Musings on My Death

Most of the time I won’t allow the thoughts to break through to consciousness.  There is a vague sense of them, a nagging little knock at the partition in the part of my brain that controls such things.  But these are thoughts that are better left sub-conscious.  They are just too unsettling, too morbid.


Today was different for some reason.   Today I walked by the house that was owned by a woman who collapsed in the local coffee shop several months ago and never woke up.   Her name was Holly.

Holly was a couple of years younger than I am, but for the most part we were contemporaries.  We had similar careers, similar lack of success with marriage and only one child, a son for each of us.  I’m sure when she woke up that morning she hadn’t planned for it to be her last sunrise.  When she turned the key in the lock on her Victorian gingerbread front door, I’m pretty sure she thought she’d park her Jeep Cherokee in front of it later that day, like always.

I thought about that for the rest of the walk.  I thought those thoughts, the ones that contemplate my own mortality.   I let them come and sit a spell.  


One of my childhood “posse” members is very sick.  He’s probably dying, because he is a 70-year-old man who is suffering from anorexia nervosa, of all things.  I guess I thought that was a young woman’s disease, which explains my initial shock at hearing that news.  But he is obsessed with his looks and with staying young.  He always has been.  It sort of makes sense, but it is so distressing to think about.
I feel great.  I’m not *suffering* from anything.  If I fail each day to take the fistful of my prescribed pills, I would risk a stroke or a heart attack or both from my high blood pressure. But I’m good about that.

Now that I’m a bona fide senior citizen, I do wonder what is in store for me in that regard.  Death, I mean.  If I had my druthers, I would choose Holly’s route, although I am embarrassed thinking about passing out in public like that.  Would I lose control of my bodily functions?  Would I have remembered my mother’s admonitions about clean underwear?  What if my tongue were hanging out?  I swear to God, those are thoughts I actually have!

I fear the kind of lingering death I’ve watched my friend “R” endure.  Ovarian cancer is a deadly son of a bitch ordinarily, but apparently it has found its match in “R”.  No matter what that bastard throws her way,”R” continues to fight.  She’s been fighting for more than 10 years now.  I doubt I would have that much fight in me and I fear the pain far more than I fear the death.

By the time I returned to my own house I had come to terms with the annoying little truth about human mortality; i.e., nobody ever really knows which sunrise will be their last sunrise, unless, of course, they take their own life.  Nobody gets to leave a “living will” that specifies where, when and of what her death will be.  Not yet, anyway.   

I suppose it is only natural for someone who has lived a pretty full life to ponder the details of The End.  I wonder if it is the writer in me that causes that.  Today could even be a milestone for me, the moment in time when I fully accepted my own mortality.  I pray there will never be a moment when I actually wish for it.