These are heavy questions - ahem, vital, ones - that don’t seem to come up very often. Does that matter to you - that your death helps or otherwise changes other people’s lives? If there’s not a point to your death, you might wonder, was there a point to your life? Sure, it’d be traumatic as hell for the people nearby, but who knows - your death might spark a social movement, a yearlong news story that launches media, legal, and criminal justice careers. Short, sweet, surprising no worries, no time for pain. Sometimes I think getting sniped while walking down the street is the best way to go. Lying around for too long also gets rather uncomfortable - as anyone who’s spent a lazy weekend in bed can tell you - and this raises a further question: should we expect comfort as we exit this life?
Many also say they want to die in bed, but consider what that actually means: just lying there while your heart ticks away, your lungs heave to a stop. Many surveys suggest that about three-quarters of Americans want to die at home, though the reality is that most Americans, upwards of 68 percent, will die in a hospital or other medicalized environment. Would I want to know when I’m going to die, or be taken by surprise? (I mean, as surprising as such an inevitable event can be.) Would I want to be cognizant, so I can really experience dying as a process? Or might it be better to drowse my way through it?
There are lots of ways to look at the query. If it helps, put yourself in that mindset that comes after a few glasses of wine with friends - your pal asks something dreamy, like where in the whole world you’d love to travel, or, if you could sleep with any celebrity, who would it be? Except this answer is even more personal.
The surprise, the pain, the fear of impending darkness.īut lately, I’ve been thinking that it’s the opposite question that begs to be asked: what’s the best way to die? Given hypothetical, anything-goes permission to choose from a creepy, unlimited vending machine of endings, what would you select? After a particularly gruesome news story - ISIS beheadings, a multicar pileup, a family burnt in their beds during a house fire - I usually get to wondering whether that particular tragic end would be the worst way to go.
0 kommentar(er)
