This was a rather bleak piece I wrote just before the pandemic changed our lives.

Death

It is not just the certainty of it that confronts me. I know that death comes to all living things. I know that this is so for folk close to me and around me. But that knowledge is not quite about me. I will mourn friends as they leave this mortal coil. Indeed, I have known unutterable grief twice as my younger brothers left me when I was just in my early twenties. But the grief and the pain was as much about a personal certainty that no one could understand the anguish their deaths were causing as it was about death itself. Now, of course, with the benefit of age I know that just about all humans will experience the best and worst of emotion and feelings such as grief and the pain of loss. I now know that the experiences I have had are not unique. Those experiences and the effect they have has been replicated billions of times over the ages.

No. What confronts me is the knowledge (OK, if you have faith, then my belief that you are wrong to dream of that con job called an afterlife) that one minute I will be here. The next millisecond I will cease to be. Now I can empathise with others and their mortal fears. But that is not me, you see. From my perspective, I am different to all other beings. My consciousness comes from inside. Behind my eyeballs rather than in front. So when I die I will be gone. Vamoosed. Vanished. Erased. This calls to my mind that old boxing analogy of the sucker punch knocking someone out 'like a lightbulb'. I mean, I may flicker for a few moments, flare even, but in the end when that filament of life breaks I shall be gone. Forever. I will no longer be inside this head of mine (that, for the record, is where I feel the real me currently resides. Not my heart or torso. Not my dick.). In life I value the capacity to think, reason and remember. But when I cease, that will cease. Bugger. Fade to black.