Death: The Last 30 Seconds of Life

This may seem like a depressing topic for some but this has been on my mind for the past week.

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I’m not really sure why it may have to do with watching the news again. For a few months, I went on a current events free diet and stopped reading, watching or listening to anything that dealt with death and dismemberment type stories. These are the type of stories you hear on a local news station that have all the same lurid factors built into them (i.e. “if it bleeds it leads”).

This was easy since I was living outside the U.S. and I discovered that other countries aren’t as fascinated with the whole “the world is going to hell in a handbasket” narrative we like in the U.S. Now that I am back in the U.S. for a bit, I have started watching local and regional news again. Or maybe it’s just that I am getting older and no longer feel invincible like I did as a younger man.

Watching news programs got me thinking about death. In the past, I worked a few different career positions that made me confront death directly. Real death, not the kind we explain to children using various euphemisms or console grieving people with rote religious responses.

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The type of death where you watch someone go from being an animated person one minute to an inanimate rotting carcass the next. Is that a harsh description? Probably, but I have never witnessed anything beautiful occurring while a human being simply ceases to be.

I have observed people who were both aware and unaware (or at least not consciously aware) of their expiration. For the conscious ones, this fact was met with sheer terror or denial/disbelief and for others, a sense of resignation and acceptance.

People I found, tended to respond to the news of their imminent demise the exact same way they responded to other shocking events in their life, the information may be different but the programming was always the same.

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As someone interested in Stoic philosophy, coming to terms with your death is the ultimate Stoic exercise. To remain Stoic while facing your own death and not allowing all the existential terror to overwhelm you is the ultimate expression of Stoic discipline.

I crave this type of discipline for my own eventual personal apocalypse. How can I build that discipline though? While going through some various quotes I wrote down, I found a quote from the Hagakure, written by the retired samurai turned monk, Yamamoto Tsunetomo:

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.

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So I started to wonder, what if I made a daily practice of imagining what my last 30 seconds of life might consist of before I die. It’s not exactly what Yamamoto had in mind: I won’t be meditating on spears stabbing me or arrows ripping me apart.

I don’t consider myself dead already but I will think about the what was left undone, what was left unsaid, successes and regrets. Maybe you can join me on this exercise? If you decide to try it out for a few months, drop me an email and let me know how it goes. Maybe we can exchange some thoughts and ideas.

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