What I think when I think about -
- death.
To have experienced it clinically is not permanent death, but it is as close as any of us can get and be able to talk about it. Death has touched us.
Interestingly, in the cohort of people I know who have also escaped its grip, death would appear to hold few mysteries. A black nothingness. Like a section of blank videotape in the timelines of our lives.
There is a gravitational allure to the “rest” of death. The phrase “rest in peace” highlights the human perception that you’ll get to experience the rest, and the peace, as some form of reward for a hard life or death.
My experience is that you experience neither of those things. You experience nothing. You are just as you were before you were born. Absolutely nothing.
But is there potential in that yawning nothingness, an infinite absence of anything more? Does it need something to occupy it? Or is that instinct just a figment of our minds grappling with the indifference of the universe? Indifferent as it was before we winked into existence and as it will be when our minds eventually die.
For me, death is not a rest, or peaceful. It is not holy glory, or damnation. It is just nothing, absolutely and irrevocably nothing.