death

The bond I feel to my parents is inexplicable, akin to nationalism where you can't quite explain why you feel so strongly about your own country. I feel tied to them, and I love them, and I would only wish the best for them, and it is so incredibly crippling to me to imagine them ever being gone.

One of my strongest memories from childhood is of laying in bed one night balling my eyes out because it occurred to me that one day my father would die. I went to bed fine, happy, but as I layed there, one thought led to another and before I knew it, the tears just wouldn't stop. I pulled the covers over my head so as to muffle the sounds as much as possible. I was just 7 or 8. I wasn't afraid of my own death, but I was deathly afraid of the one day in the future when my father would die.

As I have gotten older, I no longer irrationally cry about my parents dying. I internalize it more and more as I see them getting older and more frail. A couple of tears would flow out of the corner of my eye, but I keep back the rest in an attempt to not cry about the inevitabilities of life. It doesn't necessarily dull the pain to think about other things, but it does help to take my mind off of those thoughts.

When I think about my own death, I don't think of it as something that I fear. I regard death with a light of curiosity. When the day comes, I think I would welcome it because my curiosity would finally be satisfied as I find out just what happens to us after we die. Would I be conscious enough to realize my own death? Or would it simply be a stop in consciousness? If the latter, then who would even know? It's like that old cliche about whether a tree falling in the woods would make a sound even if no one is there to hear it. Would my cessation of consciousness even be realized by me? How would I realize it if I no longer have consciousness?

What I fear most about dying are the consequences my death would have on those I love, especially my parents. I fear how devastated my parents would be, how they may never fully recover from that shock, and how much they would suffer. For that reason, I would never be able to carry through a suicide, not because I have such a great unshakeable respect for life, not for my own sake and desire to live, but for my parents to not suffer the misery of dealing with my death.

Driving on a dark dark highway a couple of nights ago, I ran through these thoughts of death. What if I swerve and hit a siderail? What if a car runs a red light while I'm driving through the intersection? Then the thought dawned on me ... How would I feel about my death if my parents no longer are a concern? All the voices in my head paused. I felt calm.

That scared me.