Religion & Spirituality

That Moment When You Realize... You're Going to Die

That Moment When You Realize... You're Going to Die

Everyone has this epiphany at some point. We aren't going to live forever, and wether you contemplate it at 8 or 80, the experience can be truly one of absolute horror.

I remember exactly where my 17 year old self was at that moment. Sitting in my room and trying to paint roses on my fingernails, I was suddenly aware that my hands would look like my grandmothers someday. wrinkled, hollow, reavealing withered veins and every bone beneath a thin, translucent veil of skin. What would it matter if I had pretty roses on my nails? What would it matter if I had them now? No one will care if I was once the sexiest woman alive, after it all fades away, no one will care at all.

When you try try to create a schema of death in your mind, basically a mental tag that helps you wrap your head around a concept, you can't really do it. It's almost impossible to genuinely consider not existing at all. It terrified me and I couldn't even understand what exactly I was afraid of, it was simply that feeling that sinks in your stomach and try's to tear at your heart.

You can imagine the path my mind took from there, a seemingly endless vortex of inescapable despair. A glimmer of hope as I told myself that what's really important is what we leave behind, and then remembering that time would swallow up all meaning of that too. A thousand years from now my name and everything I ever thought, felt, and did will just die from all recognition. Why can't time stop and let us be remembered?

That Moment When You Realize... You're Going to Die

Never had had I felt so insignificant, so alone, and pointless, and hated by the world around me. I shook and I sobbed and I hid from death under my blanket like a toddler hides from the monsters in there closet. Nothing consoled me. In the span of ten minutes I'd gone from being happy and blissfully ignorant, to having fear slowly choke every once of joy from my soul, like a vivid nightmare I couldn't wake up from.

That Moment When You Realize... You're Going to Die

hours later, I emerged from my blanket drenched in my own sweat and tears. I still didn't understand but I wasn't afraid of that anymore. I realized that I wouldn't understand everything, and so I pushed thoughts of death back to the shadows where they belong.The world now felt bleak and threatening but at the same time I think it felt more real. My own thoughts had just tried to murder my spirit but somehow I survived it, and from that day on I was different, less of a giggly an innocent child and more of a reserved adult.

That was my experience anyway, What was it like when you realized your own mortality?

That Moment When You Realize... You're Going to Die
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