This mess is here to stay

There are times — which, for some reason, tend to occur when I'm lying in bed and it's dark, particularly between 5 and 9 in the afternoon — when the possibility of ceasing to exist — i.e. dying and there not being an afterlife — comes to my mind in a particularly vivid and persistent manner, not surprisingly making me rather gloomy and distressed. I call it a "possibility" partly because I don't want to give up hope, and partly because, even from a strictly scientific viewpoint, nobody can be sure that death is the end. The other "possibility", however, seems less and less plausible.

I'm not one of those lucky people that say they don't care that they won't exist any more after they die. "Once you've died you won't be there to be depressed about it, so what's there to worry about?" As if not suffering was all there is to it. The problem is precisely "not being there"! How could I ever be okay with that? It somehow seems that we're expected to be "mature" and have come to terms with it, but I can't help but think of death — if it really is the end — as the greatest unjustice, the cruelest joke.

The other day I was on my lunch break at work, looking forward to a quiet twenty minutes eating my meal and browsing through some of the free newspapers that were lying around. In fact I had decided to take my lunch break earlier than usual so that I could be on my own. Less than five minutes into the break I was sharing my table with a group of five of six people that I know only vaguely with whom I was supposed to have some sort of interaction. That was bad in itself, but then one of them took centre stage when he began recounting ready-made anecdotes selected from the last edition of the Darwin Awards, which are given to people that die for their own misjudgement or incompetence in a stupid and supposedly comical way. "They died when they fell off the roof of a house after having made love on top of it. Hehehe! And then this other woman had her head crushed by a lift when she was peering through the shaft. Hahaha!" I wasn't in a position to speak my mind, but I was positively despising this guy and the moron that answered back with equally tasteful and witty jokes. I don't want to become a self-righteous prig — I must confess that I smiled when I read some of things in the Wikipedia entry on the Darwin Awards — but, I'm sorry, death is not funny. At least not the real death of a real person.

The kind of angst I was talking about resembles the feeling I get with some nightmares. "How the hell did I get into this mess? Something isn't quite right here." Sometimes that strange unease resolves into the realisation that I was only dreaming, whether or not I then wake up. And then I get a feeling that says, "Phew! That was too absurd to be true. Thank God for real life, so realiable and so normal." But there are other times when that feeling is stickier and lingers on even after I've woken up. Knowing as I do that it is harmless, temporary and probably meaningless, it is an interesting thing to experience and observe. By contrast, the I-don't-want-to-die angst is all too meaningful, and it really is no fun. It'll go away — and come back at some point —, of course it will, but not because I realise the mess I was in was only a dream. This mess is here to stay.