EPTMy fiancee doesn't understand it. She has a superb viewpoint on life and death overall, I feel. It's not greedy, it isn't complicated, and it isn't akin to the fairytales we tell children in your average Disneyland movie. It is just accepting and acknowledging the beauty of the fleeting existence. I'm too egotistical or rather, too selfish for that. I actively want to live forever, love existing to the point where I am already mourning something that I will never truly undergo.
I'll never experience it, that nullity. It's one of the things Jacqueline tried to keep telling me as a comforter when it originally came to her attention; I'll never know that I'm deceased, so nothing will be painful then. All of my dread is aimed at a void I will never feel. It never worked though, because it's pinpointing exactly what I fear the most. I long to possess that feeling, that awareness to the point where I sometimes despise sleep.
I am not a portentous person. I've not done anything astonishing as to etch myself a grade into mankinds passing history, and besides, I do not care to be commemorated. I don't want renown or a name in the back of the community mind, amongst which most wouldn't ever be able to tell you much about who I am or was. What I crave is to always feel, and I can't begin to relate what wonders it would take in a fantasy land to earn such immortality. Not even those remembered have the luxury of being knowledgeable of it, and all things remembered will eventually fade anyway. Absolutely nothing lasts forever, and such is my lust for living that I desperately crave for my own existence to, however undeserving I judge my own self to be of that.
The fear I get from death is distinctly unlike most other fears I've known. It doesn't cripple my ability to put myself in peril; I don't do so often, but when it is a choice between what I want to do and fear of harm, I will choose what I want to do simply because I do not like limiting my life. However, the fear does harm other aspects of my life. My sleeping, already chaotic and unhealthy because of my disdain for spending time doing so, suffers from my fear. When I lay down at night, knowing that I'm going to soon let myself drift out of concious existence, the subject of death is most piercing. I used to cry, roll around in bed in melancholy. That was pitiful enough, but something that actually brings about concern occurs now.
I get panic attacks. I don't feel sad anymore, but trapped, like I'm stuck in this little box that will never open. I can't sit still, often end up pacing and feeling the fight-or-flight bits of my body going full force. I feel nervous, afraid, and angry all at once. It happens virtually every single night to me now, and it's only when close to Jacqueline that I know true rest.
Y'know...In all honesty, I wish I did believe in a religion. That's a cowardly thing to say, as it's stating that I wish what I felt is reality was not true. Despite that admission, I've tried. I have read print, I have attended diverse gatherings, and none yet have felt the least bit real to me. I'm not cynical of them, don't hate or look down on those who do truly feel faith in whichever spiritual point of view they hold. But, it all seems fabricated to me, things created by people who knew the world needed a good story, needed something to believe in that would last eternity, else they would possibly lose the ambition and drive to continually push humanity forward. Else they live in a state of uncontrolled despair and indulgence.
Some say that fear is a choice, and so, too, are your reactions to those fears. To those people, I say you've never genuinely experienced fear, merely sensible caution. Fear is irrational by it's very nature, and while it can be regulated to a degree and even switched off sometimes through conditioning, I do not believe such dominating control is within the range of all fears or all people.
I know it's just repeating what many have said before me and that saying it changes nothing, helps nothing. But, we all like to be heard and feel common bond with another.
In closing, I'll go back to the beginning as I know it.
As I said, I've been dealing with this since I was five. I remember the night that I brought it to my parents attention. I don't recall what started the thoughts of death specifically, but I'd been laying in bed bawling, ended up falling onto the floor without meaning to. My parents heard it, and came to see what was wrong. I got led into their room, somewhere I'd rarely been. My father sat me down on their bed, and talked with me for a bit. Tried to explain to me why it was alright. He said that there was nothing truly there to fear, with the same reasoning that I hear from Jacqueline today, that you won't be there to experience it. He said that dying is like one of my Mario games. There is no pain, no worry, nothing. Just *walk walk, fall, game over."
I wonder to this day if he was high at the time. I also wonder if they realize that I'd pick an eternity of pain over non-existence.
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