I was having a sneaky read of The Guardian at work today. The topic was death.
More precisely, our fear of death.
A lot of the comments suggested that what people feared most was dying a painful death.
I don’t fear pain. I sleep with pain, wake with it and have lived with it everyday day for the last 8 years.
And no, I don’t mean spiritual existential pain, but actual physical pain.
Pain I can come to terms with. Yes, it grinds you down, can make you numb. But it’s known.
Pain is not the thing I fear about death.
I fear the idea that I will cease to exist. That the thing that makes me me, can and will vanish.
Where will I go? Where will my thoughts go? How can I just not be here?
To vanish into darkness, how is that possible? I mean really? How can the sum total of all our experiences and feelings over the course of our lives just disappear in the blink of an eye?
Maybe there’s a heaven, or at the very least an afterlife.
But maybe there’s not.
What if there’s not?