V. How do I begin to explain what has come over me lately? I realize that so far I have only been writing about death in a specifically literal way. A narrow way, if you will. But death is a more expansive thing. It isn't just a moment when the body expires, when the heart stops beating, when the brain ceases to function. Death is these things, but it is more than these things. It is something more active. Death has a life of its own. It is an active phenomenon. It is something I have actively experienced as a negation. It is an active agent of obliteration. I say it is these things, because I have experienced it as such. I haven't yet died, but I have tasted death.

I am wrapped in death, encircled by death, and I haven't died. I have felt what it is to be, as it were, living death. Death possesses me, not merely in the fact that, like all other living things, I am going to die, but in a more profound sense. Experiencing death-in-life means enduring the constant strain of knowing the impermanence of everything. Knowing that there is nowhere to rest your soul. All the daily clatter and chatter of scandal and gossip, all of the hubbub and headlines and potentially intoxicating babble of that which is considered "the news," is in fact of no importance whatsoever. It is nothing but wind. You'd like to be able to lose yourself in it, but you can't. You're too aware that there really isn't anything there in which to get lost.

Then, too, you know that death stalks the world, ensuring that nothing is permanent. No political order can last. No contract that you sign for any given occasion assures you of receiving anything. There are always legalistic clauses that ensure someone's ability to swindle you out of what you thought was lawfully yours. Every seeming hard and fast rule is sprinkled with a hundred exceptions, and every exception is festooned with a thousand asterisks. This is a kind of death, knowing that everything is uncertain. It ensures that one can never feel true joy, because true joy is predicated on a sense that nothing can take a person away from that which moves him to joy. But in this life, anything can be taken away, and one's joy can turn to heartbreak in a split second. Not only does this apply to the deepest, most personal matters, such as one's most treasured loved ones, but it also applies in both lesser and larger ways. A football team that appears to win a game on a last-second touchdown pass may have it taken away due to a penalty. A presidential candidate that appears to have won the office, may, because of the machinations and skullduggery of the opposing party, find that a recount shows that he in fact lost and his opponent won. Victory can be given, then abruptly taken away. There is no telling when such a thing may happen. A cancer can go into remission, then return. There are few things crueller than false hope, yet the fact is that all hope is at best potentially false. Again, nothing is certain. Nothing except death.

What has all of this to do with me? I have found that in life nothing, absolutely nothing, is certain. Nothing can be relied upon. Nothing can be trusted. And truly knowing this, I find, makes life a kind of death. We were not made for this. We were made for trust. We were made for joy. Yet we find ourselves here, where joy is fleeting at best, where love only opens one up to pain, where trust is foolhardy, where hope is cruel. We were not made for this, yet here we are. We were not made for death; we don't understand it, can't fathom it. Yet we nevertheless find ourselves walking through the valley of the shadow of death. What happened? How did we get here? How do we get out?

IV. Some people say that they feel sorry for those who commit or attempt suicide. Others declare themselves outraged and offended by the notion of anyone doing such a thing. Such an act is a "coward's way out," they declare. My first thought, however, of one who has committed suicide is neither one of pity or righteous anger. It is envy.

I don't think I could ever kill myself, not because I'm brave enough to face life, but because I'm not brave enough willingly to end my life. I may not love my life, exactly, but it is all that I have. I don't love life because let's face it-- life is not loveable. Life is pretty far from being a gift horse; as such (contra Mr. Salinger) I don't think it at all improper to look it in the mouth. Seen squarely, shorn of sentiment and bereft of platitude, life is in fact rather a raw deal, at least for us humans.

Such as us weren't made to deal with what we have to deal with. We were made with backs, only to have our backs broken. We were endowed with souls, only to endure our souls getting crushed. "The whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely," etc. all play their part in this terrible process. Unlike animals, we humans have consciousness, we have awareness of ourselves, we are "spirits in a material world"-- we have intimations of immoratality; we see and sense our own eternal nature, but we find we still have to die. We age, we wither, in some cases we lose our faculty to reason; in other cases, we lose our physical faculties. All members of the animal kingdom suffer through the aging and dying process, but none of them suffer in the same way and to the same degree that we suffer. Only a man, not a dog nor a horse nor an ant, but a man and a man only, knows what it is like to endure the indignity of aging, sickening, and dying, to feel the simultaneous pain of the pain itself, as well as the pain of losing one's health, the pain that comes from being aware that one will never again have one's youth or vitality. As unendurable is the fact of one's sick, aged, withered, or dying condition, still worse is the terrible, futile longing that one indulges for one's former youthful, healthy, robust condition.

A dying horse doesn't torture himself the way a dying man does, with wistful thoughts of himself as a healthy thoroughbred, winning the Kentucky Derby or enjoying a leisurely trot through the countryside. A man recalls his fondest moments...and wishes he could have those moments forever. Such is man's hunger for eternity. He wants, not just to be full, but to have the sensation of pleasure that comes from eating filling food. And he wants it this way, forever. A horse has no desire for eternity. He lives for the moment, and when his moment is over, he feels no terror of his impending demise or longing for his prior glory. Much less does he desire that the glories of his life (such as they were-- not every horse is or can be a Derby runner) be prolonged forever. A horse is not created to desire eternal joy. He knows the meaning of neither "eternal" nor "joy." But a man has higher aspirations. He wants of life what life can in no way give to him. Yet he can't lower his standards, he cannot shed his desire for joy, because such a longing is at his essence. So man is a deeply tragic figure. He has been created by God, it would seem, for the sole purpose of suffering, of wanting what he cannot get, and getting what he doesn't want. Desiring bread, he gets a stone; hungering for a fish, he is instead handed a serpent. We cannot live forever on stones and snakes, thus we invariably perish.

We dwell in a world that can best be described as joy-haunted. Joy exists, but only as a sort of ghost. We have some vague impression that it was once here, with us, and we once could eat it, drink it, breathe it, bathe in it. But then it disappeared, leaving only discrete strands of dust where it used to be. It once was visible, audible, and tangible, but now we only get a hint of it from time to time, briefly, in the vision of a clear blue sky, in a moment in a song, in the taste of the most exquisite chocolate, in the scent of a rose.

Still, we cling, pitifully, to life, because we don't know what awaits us in the "undiscovered country" that is death. We stay on the shores of this "country" that is life, and we refuse to leave until we are dragged away by a force stronger than any of us can fight. But we are not all such cowards. The suicide chooses to become Christopher Columbus of this uncharted land, forging out across the uncertain sea in a barque fashioned by his own self-killing hand. I cannot ever have such foolhardy courage, but I'm not so full of myself or deluded to acknowledge that such a one is in many ways a greater man than I could ever be.

III.
In what manner will I die, and on what day of which year? Will death come in the morning, afternoon, or evening? Will it come suddenly or slowly? Will it be painful or might it actually be pleasurable, after the fashion that an orgasm is called a "little death"?

Will I die spectacularly, or unimpressively? Will my heart give way, and simply stop beating? Will I be conquered by cancer? Will I be shot by an armed robber, knifed by a serial killer, or blown up by a terrorist? Will I fly through the windshield of my car and onto the hard asphalt of the freeway after crashing into an 18-wheeler truck? Will I tumble over the rails of an ocean liner and drown in the middle of the Atlantic, or be torn to pieces by sharks (the actual agent of death being dependent upon whether I inhale water before the toothy ones show up)? Will I lose my footing on the top of a high cliff? Will I starve, or die of thirst? Will my life end because of the active malice of others, or simply due to the sheer indifference of nature? Will I, as one poet dramatically puts it, "rage, rage against the dying of the light," or will I simply, as another poet writes, "stiffen in a rented house"?

Will my demise be noble or ignominious? Might I somehow find the inexplicable fortitude summoned by saints and martyrs to meet the end of my time on earth with good-natured equanimity, or will I (as seems more likely) find myself shrieking and sobbing, "I don't wanna die! I don't wanna die!" before.... dying? Is a dying person at times able to draw upon a storehouse of newfound comforts that one would never have been able to entertain when not faced with death, or does one in a dying state remain as horrified as ever at the prospect of death, with all comforts, all notions of a "balm in Gilead" fleeing before one's face in one's final moments, which are instead only choked with terror?

I find that almost all of these questions are unanswerable. While we know the inevitability of death, we don't know the details. As Shakespeare's Hamlet observes, "if it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all."

Yet Hamlet is, of all things, too optimistic here, for even the readiness is not assured. How can one be ready for death if one is not almost certainly facing it? Thus, how can one ever become assured that one is ready? Is it really possible ever to be ready for the end of our earthly existence, the end of life as we know it? Lesser events are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prepare for.

Yet in all of these morbid considerations, I find one fact that gives me comfort. It is the fact that not everyone dies accidentally, or scurries about seeking escape from the reaper until the day it finally tracks us down. Some brazenly stroll up to within swinging distance of the reaper's sycthe... and stick out their necks. From this, we can glean that death need not be feared and loathed; it may actually be embraced. It actually is embraced by some. By not a few, in fact, if not a great many. What are we to make of this? To again quote the death-obsessed Hamlet, but from a different angle, how does this particular "respect" make "calamity of so long life?"

II.

Am I afraid of dying? Yes, I suppose. Who isn't? But mostly I'm just bewildered by the notion. It doesn't fit with what I know. I can't make it fit. It doesn't "compute." I know life. I don't know death. I don't know the real meaning of the infinitive "to die." It would help if I knew what it was to be born. I was born, after all (like everyone else who has ever lived, including the ones who have died), and the state of becoming a living being is as hard to figure out as the process of ceasing to be alive. Coming into being-- from what? What was I before? Where did I come from? Where am I going?

It would help, as I said, if I could remember what being born was like. Dying can't be very different. The sensation of being pulled-- as if by invisible hands-- into... what? How does it "feel" not to exist one moment and to exist the very next moment? Can it feel all that different to exist one moment and not to exist the very next moment? Pulled, as if by invisible hands, into... what?

What does it even mean to for such an experience to "feel" any particular way? Before I was, there was no "I." There was no one "feeling" anything. Then, suddenly, I was. Summoned into being, a discrete individual among trillions upon trillions of other discrete individuals, be they dogs, bugs, plants, snakes... or people. What is so special about me, that I was assembled by unknown hands and thrust into such a world? Yet at the same time, why ought I consider myself special at all? I am one among a great, great, great many. When my star burns out, will the firmament look all that different? Will it look different at all? My death, like my life, will be of no importance, at least from the point of view of the vast, vast, vast majority of the living (and dying) world. It will matter hardly more to most beings than the demise of the roach I crushed underfoot in my kitchen this morning, or the chicken who perished so I could enjoy my supper last night.

The rude fact, however, is that my death cannot be of anything but the utmost imporantance to me, because it is the end of me as I know him. It little matters who else will mourn my death, or brush it off with a shrug, or ignore it altogether, the same way I ignore most of the deaths of my fellow living beings who perish around me every day. What matters to me is that I will die. How do I begin to make peace with this fact? How does one make peace with the fact that one will no longer exist? Is it possible to be reconciled to such a fate?

Yes, you can talk to me about saints, about Buddha, about Socrates, about special people who came not to fear, nor even be severely psychologically discombobulated by the notion of their own deaths, but instead found ways to look at death utterly unphased. I don't dispute that such people exist, and have existed, and that much can be learned from them. I know myself, however, and know that I'm not one such person. I am what I am right now, and don't see myself changing substantially. There is no saint or Buddha within me struggling to come out. I am as I was made, and knowing myself to the extent that I do, I am reasonably sure that I wasn't made with of any such extraordinary material.

It's such self-knowledge that draws my attention to lesser people than those exalted souls who have found a way to shake the natural aversion of death, to somehow see "beyond" death, to put death itself, which dominates the perspective of most people who are dying, into a more proper perspective, who are able to ask "death, where is thy sting?" The martyrs, saints, and enlightened ones are a comfort to me, in a way (it is always comforting to know that far better people than you exist), but they serve no practical purpose for me, because I know I can never be like them. I am as I was made, and thus I find myself more drawn to a less noble breed of people, who nevertheless seem to have conquered their fear of dying, who don't flee from death but eagerly and inexplicably rush toward it.

I speak, of course, of that unique class of people known as suicides.

I.

I am a particular age. Never mind how old, or how young, exactly. It little matters. What does matter is that I am going to die. I am death-fated. I have death inside of me. I don't mean cancer, or anything like that, at least not that I am aware of. No, I am unusual in a way that is quite usual: like all other living things, I was born, and I am going to die. I say that I am unusual because in spite of having this quality of being death-bound, a quality which I share with every other living thing, I remain startled and disconcerted by this aspect of myself. I find myself snapping my eyes open as I lie in bed at night, in the process of drifting off to sleep, with the sudden realization that death is coming. Not just sleep, but death. Dying is somewhat like going to sleep, only more so. Sleep: a metaphor for death, a foretaste of the much deeper sleep to come. I am not startled by the notion of myself sleeping, because I have slept many times before. I am startled by the notion of dying, which I haven't done before, but must do at some unknown time in the future.

For some reason, I find everything in my life now clouded by the anticipation of my approaching death. It is difficult to see anything without viewing it in a death-context. When I'm in a room full of people, and all I can think of is how everyone in the room is going to die. The only thing left to chance is the means and the manner in which it will happen. Who will die painfully, who peacefully? Who will perish young, and who will live to a ripe, old age? Who will cease to exist due to an accident, who due to disease, who due to murder? Death has its various agents and methods, but it always gets its man. It does not always at first succeed, but no living thing is more persistent; it tries, tries, and tries again, until it accomplishes its mission.

Death is universal-- it applies to all of us, belongs to all of us, and all of us should own up to it. Yet we still insist on viewing it as something exotic, strange, unfamiliar, out of the ordinary. Moreover, we are awed by death. When someone we even distantly know dies, we are impressed. We may not have thought that such a person had it in him to do such a thing. I recall a story once told to me by an acquaintance. When a teenager, he answered a ringing telephone at his parents' house to hear his aunt's voice brusquely informing him that his uncle was dead, and instructing him to tell his mother and father. In the interim between hanging up the phone and facing his parents to tell them the news of his uncle's demise, my friend began to ponder the situation. His uncle had never struck him as an especially impressive man. He was retired, having worked at a nondescript desk job for thirty years. He spent most of his retirement years watching the news on TV and reading the funny pages, and he never had much to say about anything. Altogether, he seemed like a non-entity. What, then, made him capable of so dramatic an act as dying? When my friend tried to tell his parents that his uncle had died, he found he couldn't stop laughing. The sheer inconguity of the idea tickled him.

In a similar vien, my own death-bound nature comes as a shock to me. Before recently, I had the gift of being able to overlook the fact of my death-destination. I knew about death, but I didn't know death; death didn't stand in my way; it didn't distract me from all of the other aspects of my life. Recently, however, I find myself, as the poet writes, "possessed by death." It has a hold over me much like a demon holds a possessed soul. I cannot recognize the living bodies that surround me and the living body that I inhabit; I can only see the corpse that my body and that all bodies will become; I can only see the "skull beneath the skin." How did I become this way? Is the problem me, and my current death-skewed perceptions, or is the problem death itself? And if the problem is death itself, can there be a solution, other than to relinquish myself into the hold of death, to surrender to death--in short, to die?