I’ve always wanted to post something at 11:59 pm. I’m usually either fast asleep or in the throes of creative endeavor (or both).
I’ve been thinking a bit about the process or trajectory of death. I wonder if the transition between, for instance, sleep and the few moments before death and then full and utter death itself is one of comfort, repose, and certainty or instability, insecurity, and illusion. I think this is the thing that bothers me most about death — the very act of dying, the process by which one’s consciousness is sloughed off into another true state far from one’s experiences or expectations.
As a Jew and a naturalist, I do believe that death, in its finality, cannot be hellish. No G-d worth his salt would want people, animals, plants, or other living things to suffer in eternity — which is a very long time I’ve heard. But as a paranoic, or at the very least a modernist, I wonder if there a screech between the two states, a hurried and lousy rush of feeling, a tension among a million competing parts for the soul to be pulled out into nothingness (or everythingness). I guess I also wonder if that is felt always or sometimes, depending upon the state of the dying and the partiality or fullness of consciousness, which brings me back to sleep, which I must now do.