How does one prepare to die?
It is one thing to prepare for it when you know that death is imminent. But how do you prepare to die when you’ve lost yourself so completely in the daily living of life that you begin to believe in your own immortality. There is no way to prepare for death. No one can teach you how to die, and no one living can share your pain. You just have to hope that when the time comes you’ll know what to do. But we don’t know if we learn what to do in that final, final moment, because we cannot really think that far, and those who know this reality are far and dead. It’s a secret you carry to your grave.
And it looks like my time has come to learn that secret. Blood that was pumping with energy within me is now collecting in dark corners of my body forming shallow pools. My lungs breathe not with a will to live but with the view of avoiding pain and death; gingerly. There are moments where I have to struggle to breath. There are moments of suffocation, and of absolute terror. I know I hang on by a flimsy thread, barely an hour away from death.
What use is an hour?
It is difficult to prepare for the experience of your death. But you can definitely do enough in your life to make sure you have a comforting bed in which to die, surrounded by family and friends. I had always thought that my death would be an event, that the loss of my conscience would be cause for grief, for bereavement. I had hoped that my final words would be written down and quoted with reverence, and I’d be asked to choose an epitaph. But you can only do so much. The rest is up to the strange dances of fate.
And it is because of those very same dances of fate that I found myself staring glassy eyed at the bare green hospital wall, as undecorated as my life, fifteen minutes of my last hour lost. I had expected so much of myself, had dreamed so many dreams - what happens to potential wasted? Will it escape from my useless body and become a star again, giving light and energy to some part of the universe? Or will it die with me, cursing me to hell for wasting it, for causing it to die a needless death, to live a useless life?
My breathing is shallower now and I begin to drift in and out of consciousness. But I snap my eyes open – I don’t want to die in my sleep, unconscious of the experience. No! I want my brain to feel, feel everything up to the very last fight for oxygen. In that pristine space after my last breath is spent and before my consciousness is lost, in the vacuum of that space I will be privy to a very secret knowledge - knowledge that can’t be shared because it cannot be shared. I want to know what I am thinking of in those seconds, in that most personal of experience; a brief, sacred chasm.
A sudden beep on a monitor brings me out of my reverie. I crane my neck to see what’s happening but I can’t turn that way. But I know something is dreadfully wrong for my heart feels funny - as if it is pumping air instead of blood. I can feel its loss of strength, its feeble beats. I am unable to raise my hands, and I cannot move my legs. I am pulling hard on my lungs for air, but I am hardly getting any. Twenty-two minutes after I thought I had an hour to live, I begin to die. As soon as I think of this, I tell myself – I began to die the moment I was born – and manage to chuckle at my own joke. But there is in me an air bubble of clarity that tells me such profound/silly thoughts are starting to rule my brain as it begins to lose composure. So I keep my eyes peeled open, staring into the white light shining down at me from a bulb, focusing on the million raging thoughts of my confused mind. It is increasingly focused on the present; I can see the second hand move ever so slowly across the face of the clock on the wall as I struggle for each gasp of air. Every second is an eternity. I am trying to listen to the silence, mentally recording the experience. I would have preferred to write all of this - I tend to understand things better when I write them down.
An echoing fear grips me suddenly as a thought comes floating by – If I die now, what is it that my spirit has been trained for? Have all the years of living and fighting and creating and breathing been of any use at all? Or will I have to learn in death, the very same way we learn in life – in retrospect and hindsight - that this struggle has been pointless? That this joy has been pointless? That can’t be right.
But knowing that death is near, I am giving up on my body and I am receding into a space of my mind that I have never accessed before. This territory feels new and strange, but not uncomfortable. There is a nostalgia I attach to this place, as if I have been here before.
Increasingly, my lungs are giving in, my heart is unresponsive and my final breath is only a few breaths away. I want to die well, mentally at least. It is a hard thing to do, to die alone. I can feel my very thoughts shaking. Shivering and nervous, I try and steer my thoughts towards god, towards energy and compassion. And then, unable to hold on any longer, I let go of my thoughts too. I take one final, shuddering breath. My hands grip the bed railing fiercely – the last of my energy.
I exhale.
I exhale into a total and bloodcurdling void. I exhale into a space from which I know I cannot return, from where I will not return. In that frightening moment I realize there is nothing beyond but vacuum…
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