A reflection on death
It’s part of the privilege of being human that we have our moment when we have to say goodbye. — Patti Smith
As years pass and another birthday is on me, mortality comes to say Happy Birthday. These days, sometimes it forgets to add “and many more.” Or that omission is on purpose. It knows that there are not that many more birthdays left for me.
Also, as I get older, visitations of mortality are happening more and that too in between birthdays.
In the days of my youth, it was not so. Then, it did not even bother to visit me every birthday. Things change.
An unintended consequence of getting old and facing frequent visits of mortality is that I often find myself pondering over the moment of death. The moment of crossing over from the realm of living into the land of something that I know absolutely nothing about.
For the moment of death, I have no words to describe what to expect or not to expect.
For all I know, there is nothing after. Perhaps it is as simple as that, and I will just cease to exist.
The moment of death will be like entering a room, looking around, reaching out for the light switch and turning it off.
With so many billions of people that have already crossed the threshold of death, there is surprisingly little and anecdotal evidence at best about what may be there.
Dying has been a massive experiment since the origin of life but there is not much to say about it.
Other than death happens, and not knowing much about death, I often find myself wondering what the moment of death would feel like?
The closest I have ever come to seeing someone crossing over the threshold is sitting next to my father in a small hospital room on the night when he made the journey. When it happened, I was holding his hand and thinking that my small gesture may help him in some way. Something like holding the hand of a child to help take its first steps.
Before he did cross from the world, his breathing was getting progressively intermittent and then it stopped. Something in his biology wanted to keep on living but it was too tiring of an effort to make.
When the moment did arrive, nothing unusual happened. I am sure he was not in a cognitive is a state to know what was happening. As far as I can tell, he was unaware of going over.
His case was not in any way unique.
There are so many roads travelling along which one can cross over the threshold between life and death without being aware of the moment of taking the one final step — it could occur during sleep; it could be after we have already lost our cognitive abilities to process sensory inputs; it could be a sudden accident; it could be a moment like in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
In all such cases, the opportunity to be aware and learn something about the moment of death is not there.
There are also paths when the moment of death is known — death row inmates; the decision to end one’s own life because of being in constant pain and of no hope of recovery (euthanasia).
In those instances, can one develop a playbook of dying on how the approach the moment of death, so the fragment of experiences gets recoded, and the journeyperson keeps sending reports until the communication slowly breaks away.
It would be like an astronaut whose communication is gradually fading while sending reports back to the base in Houston. “Houston, we are drifting away in space and because of the leak, our oxygen level is steadily going down.” As moments tick away, messages get progressively intermittent and finally completely break off.
The line on the heart monitor flat lines.
The irony is that even though mortality is visiting increasingly more and keeps reminding me of death, I would never know what that experience would actually be like except that I will not be what I am now.
To know anything better than I know now, there is no experiment I can think of, or design an experiment to know more about the experience of death and communicate it to those that would be left behind.
Would it not be interesting if the approach to the moment of death was like falling into a black hole.
As I approach the event horizon of death the time slows down (at least from the perspective of people who are observing me). I approach the event horizon but never fall through the event horizon and have the luxury of sending communiques about by experiences.
Perhaps, moment of death is a singularity which we not been able to comprehend yet. But our quest continues.
Ciao.
Articles of interest:
If death was Zeno’s paradox
