Since college, my approach to life and death has evolved to a point in which I'm unsure if I should rejoice or worry. The ambition from my earlier years has all but drained from me. Most days, I now have a strange readiness for death. Panic attacks and natural dread still remain, but they are diminished. It's almost like the stirring, classic song "Ol' Man River."
"Heart gets weary/ and sick of tryin'/ I'm tired of livin'/ and scared of dyin'!"
Beautiful. So am I healthily resolved or am I merely depressed? Have I reached some religious state of peace or am I clinical? I don't know. About the only thing I do know is I don't want to suffer decrepitness and the death of my loved ones, so I'm fairly intent on eventual suicide, although hopefully not until I am of a ripe age.
I think I've already got my tombstone inscription picked out!
I like it; I think it has the appropriate sense of dark humor. Although, it costs an awful amount of money to bury and erect gravestones, wasteful burdens I wouldn't want my survivors to bear, so cremation may be a better alternative. Has anyone else given much thought to the fate of his or her remains?
5 comments:
I understand your apprehension regarding the depression that comes with the death of loved ones, but look at it this way: if you kill yourself before they die in order to escape the suffering that comes from outliving loved ones, then you selfishly force that suffering onto their plates, right? If you really love them, you wouldn't want them to suffer either.
Somebody's gotta suffer in the end, so the best way to go about it (even from an areligious pro-[suicide]-choice perspective) is to let the chips fall where they may and leave it up to chance.
When you truly love somebody (or at the very least strongly care for their well-being), you put their needs before your own or are at least willing to do so. This means that you do things like trying to outlive them so that they don't have to suffer the fate all "outlivers" must suffer.
Anyway, you don't strike me as being depressed when we hang out in person (including just this past Friday), but you have increasingly struck me as depressed on your weblog. I think "YOU NEED HELP" is waaaaaaay out of line and overboard, but I also think it wouldn't hurt you to talk to somebody about these things. If there are things you are embarrassed to share with friends or family, go find a professional therapist. That's what they're paid for: 1) to listen, 2) to not spill the beans, and 3) to offer sound advice.
Not good enough for what?
Well, not good enough to beat death. Or obscurity. Or to meet most of my ambitions.
No human has yet defeated death.
Few men defeat obscurity. Even the men we claim to know from thousands of years ago, the Moses`es and Liu Bei`s and Julius Caesar`s -- even these men's stories are more frog than dinosaur (to use a JP DNA reference ;)).
As for ambitions? That one is within your reach. It's hard for anyone alive to meet most of their ambitions, but it can be done. It requires some luck, yes, but above all else perseverance and effort.
A personal problem of mine is that I have too many goals I am trying to resolve at any given point in time. I find that I operate best and solve my goals best when I bunker down on one of them. This seems to be relevant both for my day-to-day goals (e.g. I have to clean, build a bookshelf, go see the medical school secretary about something, etc.) and my long-term goals (e.g. becoming a doctor, finding Miss Right, mastering Japanese, going to southern China, etc).
I hope you don't mind my posting on your blog as I'm a stranger. I ended up here on a google search. I just wanted to say I've been going through something very similar, as I'm sure a lot of people (though not all) do. Great post (though I don't think you should commit suicide).
PS Paul Robeson is awesome.
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