Thoughts on Dying

Bill is dead. It was a sudden onset of brain cancer which was only detected a week ago. I barely knew him - he was the husband of a woman I worked with, and he would stop by the office occasionally to say hi, or bring her something. He had a long life and a mercifully short illness.

I don't feel sadness at his death - I've thought a lot about death in the last few years. My dad is going to be 87 in March and my mom will be 82. I don't know how I'll react when the time actually comes, but I know it could happen at any time. I like to think I'm at peace with the idea. Accepting death is key to living peacefully. Even accepting my own mortality, and knowing that I could also die at any moment, for any number of reasons. I am ready. We tend not to think about death in our culture and so when it happens, we are usually not ready. If we are told we have a terminal illness, the rug is often pulled out from under us and it is then that we fully know that we are alive. And then, for some people, it is often too late to do all the things we wanted to do.

I don't want to do anything but have a deep connection with life, which I feel I have. I want to live as a loving person, which I feel I do. Every day is happier and more profound than the last for me. If I were told I was going to die soon, I would not be altered internally.

Dying is a state in which I will never be as long as I am conscious. I feel you are either 100% alive or 100% dead. I choose to remain 100% alive until I'm 100% dead. There is no dying.

I had a great aunt, whose name escapes me, who I was told was dying once when I was young. She turned out to hang around for quite a while. My joke got to be, "Is Great Aunt so-and-so still dying?" I would ask my mother this occasionally, and she would respond, a little miffed, "Yes, she is." I don't intend to die like that. I intend only to live. If I am irretrievably unconscious, then you can say I'm dying, because that's not really living. But other than that, I will never "die."

Death is also on my mind because of two stories - one of which I'm reading and one of which I'm writing. The one I'm reading is called "Life Work" by poet Don Hall, and is not so much a story, but a meditation on life as a writer, one who finds out he has cancer right in the middle of writing this very book. He thinks there is a good possibility that he will die, which adds a literary suspense, but having read the forward, I know that he did not die, but has lived for ten years after the publication of this book. It turns out that after publishing the book it is his young wife who gets cancer and dies at 47.

Any of us can go at any time. Our lives are the equivalent of a raindrop which falls quickly only to join the great water cycle again. I'm not saying I believe in reincarnation - I don't - but it's a nice belief. That we are part of something greater. That God is the storm.

The book I'm working on currently is called "The Cure," and deals with a group of terminal cancer patients who are cured by an experimental process just as humanity is wiped out by a plague that affects a supplemental element called lunarium, which people have been taking for centuries after its discovery on the moon because it promotes emotional well-being. They are spared because they are lunarium-free. They go from thinking they are going to die eminently to wondering about how to go about the rest of their lives, as others, who thought they would live forever, die all around them.

I think that we all need to meditate on our own mortality. Once you truly accept it, your life will begin.