Bare with me, the title of this post isn’t about how scared of death I am. Rather, it is more about everything else. It isn’t the actual death that I’m scared of. After having given it a lot of thought, I was just thinking about how difficult death really is. I mean, unless you’re given a period of time, you don’t really know when it’s going to happen. For all I know, I might not wake up after I post this and fall asleep. What if that did happen? How would everyone hear about it? When would it get back to my closest friends? That is one of the first things I think about when thoughts about my death enter my mind.
Something that brings me great fear in dying is that I didn’t make a difference for anyone to actually care that I was gone. Sure, people that I know might be sad, but aside from that, 5 years after I died I’d be just a distant memory of someone that was, rather than a ever present importance.
I’ve always thought that I’d want to die young. I mean, the whole idea of a tragic death really speaks to me. Young deaths are usually considered tragic. However, it isn’t so much that, as it is this: if I die young the people who speak at my funeral can talk about what I could have done with my life. Who I could have been. The places I could have gone. How I could have changed the world. If I die old, all that people will talk about is what I did, and, if I didn’t do much, then everyone would know. They would all be aware of the mediocre person I was in life. Whereas with a young death, people can pretend that I could have been more than average. Even if they didn’t believe it to be true, they could pretend, at least for a while. My whole thing with dying is this: What impact have I made? Where have I left my footprints? The scary thing for me that when it happens is that I won’t be prepared. I’ve always been able to shape the way people perceive me. Who’s going to do that when I’m gone?
