When we die isn’t even really the interesting question, as once you’re dead you won’t be around to care about
Yes, we’re all going to die. You and me and everyone else. One day, eventually, that fateful moment will come calling and take us all away. what you did or didn’t do.
No, the interesting question is how we die. Will it be cancer? Cardiac arrest? Anthrax attack? Choking on a pretzel?
Me? I’m holding out for parachute failure. Or maybe a plane crash. OK, not really, but sometimes when I’m on a plane, and we’re landing and there’s terrible weather, I start daydreaming about what a crash would be like—the oxygen masks falling, women shrieking, babies crying. Maybe I’d reach across the aisle and hold a total stranger’s hand in a final dramatic gesture as we wait for the inevitable together. The earth would sweep upon us and together we’d be slammed into eternity.
Luckily that hasn’t happened yet. But it’s exciting to think about.
When we think about our own deaths, we typically think about the final moments. The hospital beds. The crying family. The ambulances. We don’t think about the long string of choices and habits which lead to those final moments.
You could say that our death is a work-in-progress over the course of our lives—each breath, each bite, each swallow, each late night and missed traffic light, each laugh and scream and cry and crashing fist and lonely sigh—they each bring us one step closer to our own dramatic denouementfrom this world.
So the better question isn’t when you’re going to die. It’s what are you choosing as your vehicle to get there? If everything you do each day brings you closer to death in its own unique and subtle way, then what are you choosing to let kill you?
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