Are you afraid of death?

I welcome death, it is once in a lifetime experience when the universe takes what it has given to you. But even death is not the end, your body will decompose into its basic ingredients that will go on to power life in the future. I find that surprisingly comforting.

I'm not even worried about dying, when the time comes I will take the easy way out. This is something that current society just doesn't understand - we don't choose how we're born, but we can choose the way we die. I hope that one day I will be able to make that choice.

Honestly, I'm more worried about living my life in a meaningful way that makes sense to me. That is the most difficult part of being alive.

 

Foremost, I did not exist for uncountable centuries prior to my first conscious thought, and it was not uncomfortable. I assume that being dead, once I'm there would be correspondingly not uncomfortable.

I stared the grisly countenance of Death himself, right in the eye...and I kissed him on the nose. I deal with it fairly well. Not everyone is going to deal with it so well, though, because Death is a hard person to love, although it's possible. I have seen the process that is involved in someone getting there, and it's pretty grisly. Gory details first, and remember, curiosity killed the cat:

Spoiler

Pancreatic cancer is essentially, as I say often, your body digesting itself alive, while you are still inconveniently living in it. It is every bit as painful as it sounds like. A person going through this pain without adequate pain-management can spend days howling in pain, and I sat in a house listening to to my partner going through it while studying for the finals for my last semester of college. One of those alone could drive you batty.

We can give you pain-medication for it that is 70-100 times more powerful than morphine, but the problem is that it causes such massive constipation that your partner would be giving you enemas, suppositories and abdominal massages all day long, trying to get your bowels to move, and you could still end up in a situation in which your system started moving in the other direction...and yes, that means precisely what it sounds like.

What would happen to you eventually would be that your mind would start to deteriorate from a combination of the cancer and pain-medication, causing you to grow increasingly fearful and confused. You would not even be aware of being confined to a bed until you woke up briefly from your delirium and started clawing desperately at the rails, yelling in your increasingly weak voice, "I have to go!" or something of that nature.

This fear and a feeling that you need to get up and go somewhere is called "terminal agitation." It is your body's attempt to drag itself away from the camp to keep whatever disease is killing you from infecting others. You experience it as unimaginable terror.

Fortunately, we have drugs for that. On the down side, it just means we can keep you doped up so that you can die without driving us completely nuts, but it does sort of make things more tolerable for you, also.

Eventually, your pain and anti-anxiety medication drives you into a coma, and we stop giving you water except to try to keep your skin from cracking. This sounds bad on the surface, but you know those stories you hear about people seeing florid hallucinations while at death's door while wandering in the desert? Okay, that is because, when your body is dying of dehydration, your brain starts pumping endorphin double-time, so you're really stoned out of your mind.

Hospice nurses call it "God's morphine" to try to reduce the number religious fundamentalists who realize that we're actually doing something to make your death more comfortable and less horrible, or they would try to stop it. Example: Terri Shiavo. Don't tell the religious wackos, but the reality of what we're doing is putting you into a drug-induced coma and then killing you by dehydration, and we're only allowed to practice this form of euthanasia because we maintain the legal and social fiction that it's a "natural death." When you hear, in the obituaries, that someone "died peacefully in his/her sleep," that's virtually always what happened. When I hear some talking like angels came to a sweet, God-fearing old lady, one night, to painlessly take that person's soul away to Sugar Candy Mountain, I want to punch that person in the face.

Finally, your system starts shutting down. This is really a fairly comfortable process, believe it or not. As your neurons start to expire on a massive scale from a lack of oxygen, abolish from your mind the idea that this is somehow terribly painful. People coming back with reports of near-death experiences are really just reporting the powerful euphoric sensation that is associated with brain death. This part of dying is not the awful thing you are tempted to think it is. The actual dying part is actually pretty easy, oddly enough.

The stuff that is in the spoiler is pretty horrible. Trust me, it is in your future, and the exact reason that you are going to have to deal with the stuff in the spoiler--yes, this means you, not some relative, friend or some stranger in the paper but, emphatically, YOU--is the absence of a decent "death with dignity" law. Now, if that sounds like a hootenanny to you and you can imagine yourself going through it without feeling ill, then you can vote whichever way you like. Just remember, it is not a question that you will go through it, just like everybody else. You are not special.

To be clear, the dying part is actually not that bad. The problem is that you can only do it once, and I have a lot to live for. There are many things that I want to try and places I want to go. I am not afraid of dying because I have embraced being alive, for the only thing that I really fear is wasting or misusing the time that I have. My time is precious and dear, and I revere every minute of it and love every unique and special person that I get to know, even the difficult ones who are hardest to love.

Yes, a longer life would be nice, but for every extra minute that we manage wring out of life, we ought to think carefully about what we are going to do with it and how we are going to make that extra minute worthwhile. There is no sense in giving ourselves more minutes to live without increasing our will to be alive.

 

I am not afraid of death, but of dying yes. It is the process, the pain, the discomfort, and hopefully the good-byes. I believe in an afterlife so death isn't a problem at all. If I'm wrong I won't know it...no big deal.

 

Whereas not believing in one will not keep me from having one, and any deity that would turn me away, over my honest and soberly thought-out opinion, is not a person that I--or anyone else, in my opinion--need to know. I don't have any use for friends who require me to lie to them.

 

Strangely enough, the prospect of an afterlife was more distressing to me, because I was certain that I was on a one-way ticket to hell. I have long since abandoned that idea, and my fear of dying isn't as profound as it was. I was never religious to begin with, and although I don't want to die, I can't bring myself to believe in a concept as ridiculous as eternal damnation.

I can completely relate to those that do though. Prolonging life is one if humanity's ultimate goals - or even immortality. If someone gave me undeniable proof that loved ones of the past were waiting for me on some godly plane, the thought of dying wouldn't be so bad.

Oh well - if it all goes to plan I won't be dead for another 60 or so years.

 

As of now, I don't want not to exist. I would very much like to keep existing forever because there's so much beauty in the world and the universe that I would like to witness.

 

I am going to take this question to be about dying. To quote Jim Jeffrey, I won't even care that I'm dead! You know why? 'Cuz I'll be fuckin' dead! I'm profoundly sure that nothing is going to happen after I die. I'm just going to rot in the ground. So, being dead? Having no experiences? That doesn't scare me at all.

What does scare me, and in fact I'm terrified by it , is the prospect that when I die, it will be slowly and in a lot of pain. I don't imagine very many "she died peacefully in her sleep" scenarios. Instead, I see a future where I die in combat, probably after unfortunately losing, so like, from a stab wound, or a gunshot or something like that. It's the agony that scares me.

 

Well, those who are concerned about the pain associated with dying should really consider making a career out of studying pain-management or effective hospice care. Really, the trick to hospice care is the issue of management. It is very hard to make sure that nurse aides are doing simple things like alleviating "bed sores" and other such things. Therefore, you could really take a business degree, if you wanted to, and look into the management issues associated with hospice care. To earn an MBA, you really need a concentration and a specific subject of study, and since you are going go have to deal with dying eventually, this would be a really awesome thing to study.

 

What he said.
my first degree was an AA in informations systems, mostly programming back in the day of COBOL and FORTRAN. ( these are now like reading hieroglyphics )
I added to that and recieved an MBA
I am currently going for an AA in Addiction Counseling which will end up with a BA in Psychology.
From there, I dont know, but I do know that when you stop learning, you stop living.

 

I still read and write Fortran 77.

 

I find immortality and any kind of eternal afterlife a million times more terrifying. I don't even find dying scary because I'll probably be asleep (although all my imagined situations are combat based or someone attacking me cause I'm weird.)

---------- Post added 9th Jun 2015 at 04:51 PM ----------

This

 

I don't care about death itself, cause it's inevitable, and there's no afterlife to be scared of.

I am afraid of the time before dying, though. Knowing your time is gonna end must feel horrible.

 

When I was fourteen, we had to write about ourselves in class. One of the questions was, How would you like to die?

I stand by what I said then. The way matters little, but I want to know I'm dying. I want to know I'm leaving, because I don't believe in an afterlife, and I believe that those thoughts will be the last thoughts I ever have -- and yes, that terrifies me.

I try not to think about it. But I am scared of dying, and I'm scared of losing the people around me.

 

As far as how I would like to die, being finished off by a tiger cub while its proud mother watches approvingly. Because kittens are cute, even when they are going to be making a meal of me.

 

Nope. In fact I take comfort in the fact that I won't last for ever as it gives me a much greater appreciation for the time I have now.

Happy days

 

I'm skeptical about the idea of life after death, and I have no idea what's in store for me on "the otherside", so the thought of death terrifies me.

I see that as both a curse and a blessing. I will have to die one day, and the idea horrifies me, but had it not been for this fear, I may have commited suicide years ago. My fear of death is a big part of what made me hang on to life for so long.

 

I am very much afraid of death. The thought of simply not existing for the rest of eternity makes me terrified. I wish I were more religious or spiritual with all my heart. I try not to think about it, because when I do, I am paralyzed with fear. Typing this short post is actually making me nauseous.

 

Why should I be afraid of death, he should be afraid of me

 

I'm absolutely terrified of it. I try not to think about it though... I just want something to happen when you die. The thought of just nothing forever scares me :'(

 

but rorshach my dear your attitude towards death is the most fearless ive ever seen