Response

When I was younger it was common for my family and me to circle around the backyard fire pit at my woodland vacation house. Nested between the small hills of Noble County, the house was located in a secluded area right outside the borders of a state park. One of the things I remember most from the times I spent there when I was young was how the distance from any major cities created the perfect atmosphere for stargazing. On most nights my family members would declare that they were heading in, one by one, until it was only my father and I. Together we would gaze up into the night sky able to see layers and layers of stars. The view of the Milky Way was breathtaking, and the clarity of the night sky was so unlike anything that could be seen back in the suburbs of my home. During these long gazes into the dark I would begin to feel so small, like my world was an enclosed little snow globe and I was one of the indistinguishable floating flakes. I would look up and try to imagine how it never ended; how it kept going on and on. At the time, I did not see the bigger picture and all I got out of these late night scrutiny’s about our universe would be a eerie panicky feeling mixed with a bafflingly deep confusion. Though I certainly wondering a lot of things, what I failed to ask myself was this: what scares us as humans so deeply in our core about the idea of eternal infiniteness?

For centuries human kind has conjured up hundreds of different experiences for what to expect after death. Each one of these is accompanied by a back story, and a set of guidelines to better the chances at a favorable resting place after death.  Religion is commonly used to try and justify the unknown. Why, as humans, do we feel the ultimate need to rationalize what we do not know? For most of us, it is not the actual act of dying that scares us, but instead the fear of the continuous forever that encompasses it. Is it a form of deep self-righteousness and egotistical thinking that creates a sense that people are certainly just too important to simply end once their time on this planet is up? Does humanity hold itself to such a high degree that it believes it is too good for death.

Years later I made a habit of straining my brain for hours before falling asleep trying to wrap my head around what it would be like to actually be dead; another form of eternity. It was not like I wanted to be dead; I just could not help but to imagine the unknown. Many times my feeble attempts would leave me sitting in the dark, wrapped under my covers asking myself more and more questions. “Where do we go? What is there with us, or are we all alone? Will I be conscious? Will I know that I am dead” Sometimes I would ask myself unanswered question after unanswered question and push myself to the brink of panic attacks. With tears running down my face I would leave my room for the sanctity of my parents comfort. My mother would have to try and sooth my over-anxious mind and tell me about how this was “nothing I needed to worry about right now”, and tell me to take a shower to calm down and go back to bed.

Now looking back at these episodes I wonder to myself: why did I have these intense reactions? What enabled me to just accept that maybe there is actually nothing. What in our minds triggers such stress when contemplating this subject? Through talking this over with a few close friends and family members, it appears that the most common issue that leads to these crippling boughs of anxiety is that our brains simply cannot comprehend in total the notion of something that never ends. Much of the time the eternity of life after death is brought up without considering what it was like before birth. There was an eternity of time before each person existed that no one can actually grasp.  To think about life after death in the same context as before you were even conceived may ease a worried mind, or plague it with new troubles. There was no darkness; there was no feeling of loneliness or boredom because none of these things existed.  

It is said that people leave this world in the state at which they live; an anxious worried person will die in a state of anxiety as opposed to the person who learned early on to accept what they were going to inevitably be dealt with. If this is true, I want to put my mind at ease and accept what is to come. In the end, no matter what is believed, how much time was spent worrying or avoiding the subject, everyone will eventually find all the answers to the questions that they are afraid of. Each person will feel what it is like to not-exist and what it means to be infinite. Countless questions may be asked and argued but only we are able to answer them with time.