Was thinking yet again about death tonight, my least favorite topic.
Death sucks. It’s life’s ultimate inevitable. Whether I live 120 years or 60 years or 36 years, I will die, and be nonexistent for eternity’s beyond. I will not be sleeping or resting. I’ll be dead. Which means, unless you believe in an afterlife (I don’t, though I’m certainly warm to the idea), everything is over. There is no blackness, because black does not exist. There is no America, because America does not exist. If you died for a cause, the cause doesn’t exist. You are dead.
I know many people who talk about legacies. I’ve been told that, by writing books, I’ll have a legacy. “People will read your books after your gone, and your voice will be alive.” This does nothing for me. What good is a legacy if you’re not around to embrace it? Along those lines, what good is a eulogy when the eulogized doesn’t even get to hear all the kind things about himself.
I go hot and cold with death. Sometimes I accept it and even embrace it. We’d go crazy if life were eternal; the sunsets would no longer dazzle; love wouldn’t be love; the tastiest food would be cardboard to the soul. I agree. And yet, at the same time, I see little positive in my future of unawareness. Do George Washington and Kurt Cobain seem happy to you? How about Mike Darr and Jim Morrison and Tupac? How can they be? They’re dead.
In a strange thought pattern that I can’t quite explain, sometimes I am encouraged by suicide. Not my own, mind you. But maybe these people—deemed crazy by the world—are onto something. Maybe they know a secret to the other side; or have a grasping of death that eludes my limited mind.
Or maybe I’m just unable to handle this.
