Straight from the (Jack)Ass' mouth

it's been over a week since i last posted and i thought it's about time. sabi nga ni marjoe mahaba na yung masusulat ko eh... read on and see na lang.

last week my tita died. she's my dad's half-sister and she's 88. first of i'd like to say that i'm not posting this out of some morbid curiosity. this post is nothing more than a reflection...

anyway...

if you think about it no one will really experience death. i mean we all experience dying (think tyler durden in fight club: This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time) but we can never truly know what it is to be dead. phenomenologically speaking, once you turn off the brain then nobody can experience what it's like to be dead. indeed this could be most unsettling because it is the most alien of (un)sensations. would can you be aware that you are no longer aware? will you feel that you are no longer feeling? would you know that you're already dead?

unfortunately with death even partial ignorance does not bring with it partial bliss.

we have our own fear, but also our own hopes, that we associate with the openness and unpredictability of death. this fear and hope are seeded in the fertile ground that is our imagination made fecund by our ignorance of such an absolute reality as death. we know we will die. we do not know when. we do not know how. we do not know what is after death or if there is anything after. and so we imagine for ourselves a whole spectrum of benign and malign and amoral possibilities. heaven. hell. reincarnation. oblivion.

so if we can't experience death for ourselves then is it possible to experience it vicariously? can we postulate death from the actual experiences of others? like i've said nobody experiences what it's like to be dead so there isn't anybody who can tell us about it.

unfortunately the preceding statement regarding the impossibility of a direct vicarious experience of death implies one stark reality: others die and it is the effect of their deaths that we do experience. there could be innummerable reasons why people cry their eyes out during funerals. regret. realization of their own mortality. relief. god knows what else. but i have always held a belief that when people cry at funerals it's not because they feel sorry for the person who died but because they feel sorry for themselves. they feel sorry for themselves because they are the ones left alive to feel the effects of death.

what do i really want to say? i don't really know. but here's another thing to think about... just a little personal saying i sometimes tell myself when i remember that i won't be alive forever...

"Live today so it would be of worth to die tomorrow." - pj_jackass

posted by Peejay @ 5/24/2004 12:45:00 AM