Death: A Stream of Consciousness and Realization

He knew that he would die someday, but he didn't know it. It was a truth he knew, but it wasn't one that was true to him. Everyone dies, to be sure. But that did not mean that he had accepted his own death. That one day he would die. And when he died, few would grieve. In short order he would be forgotten, wiped from the pages of the book of time. Erased. Forgotten. His tombstone, should he decide to have a tombstone (he had not thought that far ahead because he did not accept his death) would be worn down by time, and even the stone of his tombstone-far longer lived than he-would be washed away. Crumbled to dust, and scattered. He had been fortunate not to lose any immediate family to death in his adult life. Faint memories of lost great aunts and great grandfathers fluttered by-the tears dabbed up and the pain dulled by the many years between childhood and adulthood. So it was not real to him. It was not fresh enough in his mind. His life spilled out before him now. The grains of sand in the hourclock of life were many. But there would be a final grain-a final moment in his life. Whether or not he would realize the significance of that last grain in his last moments of his life remained to be seen. But, by all accounts, it would be too late. Too late to turn aside the end. Emptiness would be all he knew. Emptiness and blackness for an eternity. But even that-that nothingness-he would never know. Life for him would just end. As it does for everyone in their time. His family will all fade away. His friends, his enemies, and his lovers. All gone. Again, this he knew but his own death was not a certainty. Perhaps the problem stems from not being able to imagine nothing, an end to everything. Even asleep, when we are closest to death, we dream. We may not always remember the dream upon waking, but at the time they register. Deep down, the dreams are real. They are a connection to life, and so they stave off the nothingness of death. But even picturing nothingness-a blank canvas devoid of texture, color, or warmth-cannot make death known to him. It is all around us, death. Every day we squish beetles, swat flies, and crush snails without remorse. They are, and then they suddenly aren't any more. And we go about our day as if we had not sentenced others to this long dearth, this long emptiness. It is not real for us. We know of it, we have brushes with it, but we cannot know death because we can't come back from knowing the end. And so we continue with our lives. Death waits for us but we pay it no heed. One day death will claim him, and he will leave the grasses and pleasures of this world behind. But until then, he will live. It would be wishful, and utterly foolish, to maintain that he would spend every moment to its fullest, squeezing every drop of life from every grain of time. But it will be his life. And at the end, he will have regrets. He will have what ifs and but onlys. But it will have been his life. And there is some small comfort in that.