Confession of a Morbid Obsession

  Death. Not just any death, but MY death.

It seems like it’s always on my mind.

It’s as if there is a grim reaper constantly lurking over my left shoulder, like Don Juan suggested. I mean let’s face it, it’s something that will happen to every living being in existence.

I’ve heard it said before that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. I disagree.

I would say that there is only one single certainty in this life, and that is death.

What haunts me the most is wondering where I will go when I die. Somewhere? Anywhere? Nowhere?

Probably NOWHERE. But where is that exactly?

It doesn’t make sense to me, this dying. How is it possible to be HERE one moment and then to just disappear the next? What happens to who I am? Will I have some sort of a consciousness? Will I retain any memory at all of this life that I live now? Will I see my Dad again?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions and I don’t think that anyone in the world does. This frustrates me. How can I be expected to go on smiling every day like everything is okay all the while pretending that death is not around the corner. The fact is that this body that I inhabit will one day STOP living. STOP breathing. What then? Is that the end? Will I ever know life again as I know it now?

It’s hard not to let a day pass without thinking about my mortality. In fact I don’t think that I’ve ever been able to do that. I constantly wonder about the details of my death. How will I go? How long do I have? Will it be painful?

If I could pick the way that I would die I would choose to pass in my sleep. Or, to make things a little more interesting and unusual, perhaps I would pick freezing to death. I don’t think that it would be too painful, more so uncomfortable. I’d kind of slowly disappear into nothing – or something, depending on how you look at it…

A part of me feels like things will work out, that it (whatever it is) will all make sense one day and that I’ll be okay in the end, but without knowing for certain I can’t help but to fear, doubt and worry.

I want to be as certain as I am that I will die one day, as I am about where ‘I’ will go when I’m dead.

Is that possible?