Jens Berges' blog part 6

Why I should fear death?

After having been healthy enough to make it to 72, I have now been diagnosed with a terminal lung disease.

So I have been thinking more about what this all means, and about what lies ahead.

Death.

But wait a minute.

What, actually, is death?

The English language is notoriously imprecise, even fuzzy, on many subjects, and if we think in words (not images, etc), the results are often nebulous.

In the English language, death can be two distinct things.

It can mean the process of dying, like in this sentence: The torturer inflicted a slow death on his victim.

But it can also mean the state of being after having died, like in this sentence: Life is short, death is forever.

I cannot see a point in fearing death (the long void after I have finally died).

But I have good reason to fear death (the process of dying), as this can be extremely painful and stressful.

Take, for example, dying trapped in a sinking ship, as it happened to 650 of the 989 passengers when on September 28, 1994, the cruise ferry MS Estonia went down in the Baltic Sea. Another 202 died in the open water.

The sinking took about an hour.

So, what would you do when you were to find yourself trapped on a sinking ship?

My "choice" would be to kill myself as fast as possible in another way, not wait to die from my lungs filling with water.

As a captain of a ship, one would have access to a gun; an upward shot through the mouth could preempt a worse fate.

Next best would be a knife to slice the arteries of the wrist, to bleed oneself unconscious before becoming submerged.

Human civilization on its current stage of development does not concern itself enough with ways to make the dying process more comfortable, or at least less horrible.

That is why on passenger ships, you have life vests, life rafts, and other survival equipment, but no provisions whatsoever are made for people trapped in a sinking ships.

I have an idea, though. There should be access to small individual nitrogen canisters with attached breathing masks, so that, at least, trapped individuals can take a few deep breaths to knock themselves unconscious, or more, before drowning.

So, back to the question of whether I fear death.

The answer depends on what we mean by death.

I do not fear death in the sense of the void of which I will be part after I will have died.

But I fear death in the sense of the process of my dying, as the circumstances may be extremely painful or stressful.