I'm going to be 68 in a couple of weeks and I've come very close to death several times; in 2004, I had major surgery after which the surgeon told me that when the ambulance brought me into the ER, I was circling the drain anf there was a fear I wouldn't survive the operation. I'm not religious and I'm still not. I had a couple of dreams in the past where I died and, both times, the moment of death was just a void, nothing to see, hear, feel, or connect with, just emptiness; at that point I would wake up. When I had that 2004 surgery, I do recall fleeting moments in the time leading up to the surgery; I recall being wheeled into the OR and the couple of minutes up to the doctor putting me under; what was interesting was, as I dutifully counted backwards, there was a sudden blackness, identical to my dreams, and I remember vividly thinking to myself how I'd been here before; after what seemed like or two or three minutes of ruminating over the void I was in, I finally lost consciousness. When I did come out from under, with the doctor slapping me in the face to try and revive me (oh, I would have pounded him, if I could have raised my arms
), I thought back to that void and realized I missed it now...
Life is a bit of an ongoing crap shoot: there's always something out there that might do you in; and the idea that a healthy lifestyle is an assurance of long life, as in a game of craps, its a fire bet, a long shot to hit. Look at James Fix, the guy who popularized running and jogging for fitness; he died at age 52, of a sudden heart attack, while on a run. Or look at John Ritter, the actor who was famed for his physical comedy; he did countless pratfalls, tumbles, and committed general mayhem to his body over the course of his career and was still considered to be in pretty god shape; he died of a tear in his aorta suffered while he was filming a sitcom. It all just a roll of the dice...
There was an actor from the Golden Era of Hollywood named George Sanders. Aside from his acting, he is know for how he died; he committed suicide:
Quote:
Final years and death
Sanders suffered from dementia, worsened by waning health, and visibly teetered in his last films, owing to a loss of balance. According to Aherne's biography, he also had a minor stroke. Sanders could not bear the prospect of losing his health or needing help to carry out everyday tasks and became deeply depressed. At about this time he found that he could no longer play his grand piano, so he dragged it outside and smashed it with an axe. His last girlfriend persuaded him to sell his beloved house in Majorca, Spain, which he later bitterly regretted. From then on he drifted.
On 23 April 1972, Sanders checked into a hotel in Castelldefels, a coastal town near Barcelona. He died of a cardiac arrest two days later, after swallowing the contents of five bottles of the barbiturate Nembutal. He left behind three suicide notes, one of which read:
Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.
Sanders's body was returned to Britain for funeral services. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the English Channel.
David Niven wrote in Bring on the Empty Horses (1975), the second volume of his memoirs, that in 1937 his friend George Sanders had predicted that he would commit suicide from a barbiturate overdose when he was 65 and that in his 50s he had appeared to be depressed since his marriages had failed and several tragedies had befallen him.
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I am not suicidal myself, but I can appreciate the desire to avoid boredom and incapacity. Myself, I have the position that there are still a lot of people I haven't pissed off yet, so I feel I still have a calling...
As for an afterlife, I feel, given the standards by which the Judaeo-Christian God and other sundry deities have imposed on mortal man, damned few, if any are going to make the cut for the upward path; I'm pretty certain if I did ,it would be cause for a call to review the selection process for possible deficiencies...
Who knows? Maybe, one day, I'll just get damned tired of it all, say the hell with it all and seek out that void...
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