On Dying

Turned 50 last year. The end of my life is closer than the beginning. I have two grandparents who lived to be 90+, but I am certainly past the halfway point.

Feels like my health started downhill 5 years ago, beginning with the kidney stone. Actually maybe it began a couple years earlier with some kind of bronchitis attack. Throat hasn't been the same since. May be having the occasional heart murmur trouble the past few years.

Leads you to wonder...but that's not what this blog post is about.

I'd prefer to die pretty quick, rather than gradually deteriorate. My mother-in-law has Parkinson's, that's a slow degeneration. Alzheimer's is too; dementia, etc...and you're not allowed to decide to just die, and by the time you really need to be able to, you don't even have the ability to make the decision.

My dad died of pancreatic cancer. Gradual deterioration for six+ months, and then fairly quick the last 30 days. (I have the feeling he had some Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam.)

Is this life all there is? Is there an after? What happens after? Should I want whatever it is? What would we be "reborn" as? Am I reborn as a human-shaped being? At what age? (i.e., am I reborn at age 25, or the same age as when I died?) Am I a more/less-likable person? Better looking? Am I still "me" physically and mentally? What about everyone else? Will I have to worry about job/income/housing/food etc? Just like now? Will I have to deal with the same amount of obnoxious other people? The same ones?

Read the comics enough, and the impression you get (at least from Family Circus) is that once dead and living in heaven, that is all about standing around on the clouds, talking. OK, that's not the daily struggle for food and shelter. But what happens when the obnoxious person decides he wants the cloud you're on?

If the afterlife is just like this one, I'm not too interested. I'm not going to be interested in fighting the same kinds of battles for all eternity. But I don't want to just stand around and talk. Reading on some religious-based websites you can readily find that heaven is not going to be much like this, but in ways that we cannot imagine, and that we shall all be made perfect. Which really means that a lot of us are not going to be the same person. Wants won't be the same, either, so one expects less inter-personal conflicts. Or maybe they are just different ones?

All unknowable. But you gotta wonder...