Thoughts on death

* I'm writing these thoughts on death because I just came from the funeral of my friend's mom. Death is the only other certain thing in life, aside from taxes. May God bless her soul.

Whenever I think of death, I've always had one thought in mind: I want it fast. No more waiting. No more knowing that I'm gonna die. I want to die in an instant. If I were to die, that's how I want it to be - fast.

So basically, that means I don't want to die of cancer or some lingering illness. I don't want to live knowing that I would die soon. I don't want a death sentence hanging over me as I lie on my hospital bed. I don't want to go through the agony of thinking that I'm gonna die within the next few days, weeks, or months. No, no, no. Not like that.

The way I'm gonna die someday, I think, is in a fast manner. At the rate I'm going, I think I'm gonna die of a heart attack in my 50s. Not unless, of course, I push myself to go "off the ledge, over the edge". But yeah, sadly, it will be a heart attack.

There have been points in my life where I could have died but by some God-knows-what reason, I didn't. I remember getting a severe pneumonia back in 1989 when I was in second grade. At that time, I was naive to the thoughts of death. I actually didn't think pneumonia was a killer until I read about it in some newspaper. I just thought it was a very high fever that required me to be hospitalized.

And then, in 2002, I almost fell through the ceiling of our apartment rooftop. Because there was a storm and some tenants complained of leaks, I, together with the handyman, went to investigate where the leaks were coming from. We then went up the ceiling to check it out.

Well, heavy old me stepped on weak plywood and I fell through. Lucky thing was, I was able to catch a grip on a solid part of the ceiling and my foot caught some bars for me to stand on. But imagine the horror when I almost fell through. If I didn't catch anything, I would have fallen down and hit the concrete below. That was how close I was to death.

And then again, there were times when emotionally, I felt like I died. Like when everything was going against me last year, including the death of a dream and all other terrible realizations and truths that came out after that, I just felt like dying. I felt like my life was sucked out of me. Sometimes, it's hard to live knowing that there's nothing to live for anymore. All motivation to live suddenly flew out the window. It's hard to live that way and it was hard for me to spend my last year in college with those thoughts in mind. My last year in college, especially the last 4 months, were the most difficult of my life and I felt like I was a dead man walking. Clearly, there was no motivation for my existence but I just had to do what I had to do. If I was crazy enough, I might have actually pushed myself "off the ledge, over the edge". There was that much pain there.

That brings us to today. Today, I'm still haunted by those same old ghosts that made my last 4 months of college hell. It's something I'm afraid I'll never exorcise soon. It may take me years to get this monkey off my back (if I ever do).

Only time will tell how I'll fare in this war against depression and "death". Right now, I feel like I'm on the losing end...