When I was ten or eleven, an older cousin of mine told me the story of Our Lady of Fatima. The general story is relatively simple – in 1917, Mary appeared to three young children in Fatima, Portugal and shared with them three great secrets. The first two secrets described hell and the saving of souls sent there. The third secret was meant to be shared with the world in 1960 – but, at the time I was being told the story, in the mid-1980s, it had yet to be told to the public.
The reason the church had not shared this third and final secret, my cousin explained, was because it spoke of terrible things. The end of the world.
Now, as a young child, the idea of my own death was much too abstract for me to even begin to grasp. But the idea of the world itself ending was just large enough for me to understand. Frightened, I locked myself in my grandparent's bathroom and tried to cope – it felt like a large chasm had opened beneath me, and there was nothing, nothing, that could pull me away from it except for my own fraying willpower.
This was the start of my grappling with mortality and religion. Raised Catholic, I was well acquainted with the idea of an afterlife. But my increasingly logical understanding of the world around me insisted that such ideas were created to stave off the threat of oblivion. No matter what other feelings I have about religion and faith (which is another topic entirely), a part of my mind simply refuses to rely on the fact, on death, I'll be banished to hell or lifted to heaven.
For some, the idea of oblivion is a balm. But for me, my mind refuses to accept the idea that I may someday no longer exist as a sentient being. For most of my life, my answer to this was simple.
I would avoid thinking about my own death.
For a while, this worked quite well. But the older I get, the harder a fact it becomes to ignore. It does not help that I am not in the habit of ignoring an issue. I tend to hit them head-on, deal with the consequences, and move on.
And I did, in fact, try confronting my fear, spending entire nights laying awake and staring straight into the void that I know awaits me. This lead only to a sickening feeling that refused to go away and a distinct lack of sleep.
It was time for a different approach. In my mind, I separated myself – the self that understands and accepts inevitable oblivion, and the self that goes on. Now, whenever my thinking skates along the back of mortality – such as exploring the limitations of human thinking or examining the inherent fragility of human life – I direct the output of such though experiments to my other self.
Having grown up with a healthy attachment to angels and fairies, both, the notion that the soul would not carry on in some fashion after the death of the body was laughably absurd. It might not be true, I realized, but that was okay: I didn’t need it to be true to believe it. After my first child died aborning I decided that after-life oblivion simply wasn’t an option: I decided that that particular possibility simply could not be true. The mere suggestion was (is) unbearable.
The mind is a queer beast.
Interesting.
I have envisioned my demise. Be it nothingness, a happy cloud or whatever, i imagine I will be ready to pass into it, just as I pass through the days and minutes that constitute my here-and-now.
Oddly, it comforts me but I like motion for the sake of moving.
I only feel a blush of shame that someone will have to dispose of my messes and accumulated stuff.