Yes. I wonder what will happen to my plushies. It seems idiot I know, but I have around 150 plushies and they are bound together. They share a story. I don’t want them to split, I don’t want us to be apart, and I don’t want them to “die”.

Yes, since I already experienced it once. Before that I was terrified.

I spent New Years in a camper van way out in the countryside.
While falling asleep I had the thought “if there’s something wrong with the gas heating, I could die in my sleep tonight.”
And then I realized that I would be perfectly fine with that. I’ve had a great and adventurous life so far, achieved my goals, have no children, and I know friends will take care of my cats.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not the least bit suicidal, but I am not afraid to die anymore, and that’s a greatly liberating feeling.

This is an impossible question to answer with certainty for pretty much everyone. Maybe the extremely suicidal or the terminally ill, but likely not anyone else.

Death (and our perceived relationship to it) changes with our proximity to it. So, being existentially and emotionally prepared for death when you’re young is very different from when you’re old, and from when death is pretty much imminent. I would wager even people who report a high degree of confidence that they are prepared for their eventual death are less so (and likely much less so) when they are facing imminent death. I imagine the number of people who don’t experience fear when their death is imminent is actually quite low.

I have considered myself prepared for death for much of my adult life, but since sometime in my 30’s I have also accepted that I can’t predict my preparedness in the months-to-moments before I die. The existential threat of your existence ending is simply too dependent on its immediacy to be predicted with certainty ahead of time.

I’ve gone through it all so many times in my head, I do think I’d be prepared, but I am not ready, never have been, as illustrated by my consistently disappointing attempts at suicide, more so when I was younger, but not so many years ago, too.

There’s, fortunately, enough for me here not to be ready, instincts fight back, the mind finds a way to end in a satisfying enough compromise for whatever acute drives me there at the time. But since I’ve gone far enough on many of those occasions, I’ve done a lot of both mental and emotional work to be prepared, I’m happy with how my life is and has been, I wouldn’t feel like I miss anything, or I didn’t get to do all I wanted. I have. The important bits, that is. All the rest are just nice little things to do while I’m stuck here.

I was never suicidal in the bitter or angry sense. I’ve always just been simply too tired to bear everything life brings. It’s just too much and not worth it in my mind. But apparently my subconscious thinks otherwise. Which is fine. It’s a beautiful world, for the most part people are amazing and full of light, the nature just fills your soul with joy and a sense of wonder, animals are just so impossibly adorable to observe from afar, some from close enough that their excitement and love just rubs into me, too.

It’s all good, but not worth all the rest of it. It’s just way too tiring. Makes you empty and drained on a daily basis. There’s so much love and beauty, but not enough time, not enough resources, not enough anything to really reach them in a consistent enough basis, so you fight and you fight, you bear through everything to get there more often, and it’s simply not enough. It’s not worth it. I’d rather cease to exist and be blissfully oblivious to all of it. And be happy I got the time I did with it all. It was beautiful, in part, and it was so endearing, in part, but I’d rather leave it at that, smile and fade away to nothingness, away from all the toil and effort it takes to barely reach anything.

So in a conscious sense I’m all prepared, I’ve even gone and talked my friends and family through all this, so they’d be prepared too, so there wouldn’t be any threads left hanging. It’s all wrapped up nicely in a beautiful, happy little bundle, that should let me join eternity in peace, with a smile. I’d even like to think I’m ready, but in practice, I’ve had to come to accept my subconscious self simply doesn’t agree. Every time it feels like it does, finally, and I go through all the song and dance, and at the last minute, it halts my hand and makes me back off. Sometimes so bitterly close to release.

So I can’t really say I’m ready, even though I feel ready. Have felt for a very long time. Decades.

But I’m happy enough to remain here. It’s still a beautiful world. People, animals, nature are still so full or wonder and love. It feels barely worth it, I’d even say not worth it really, but the subconscious self has its own evaluation which doesn’t line up so nicely with mine. But I guess I should be happy about it, since while each and every day brings further drain, more burden, heavier a weight on my shoulders, it also adds up slowly to the pile of beauty and love and light and all. Not in a bearable ratio, in my mind, but who am I to question my subconscious. It’s still beauty, love and light. I’ll take it, if I have to, and I’ll cling to it all for sense of self and purpose.

Once I get to go, I’ll be all the more relieved, the more the burdens grow and the eyes tire. And the pile of beauty and love will have grown a bit bigger.

It doesnt matter if you are prepared or not, and once it happens you wont be around to feel anything about it anyway. So its not really worth worrying about.

I’ve dealt with brain cancer on and off for most of my life, and for a while things were looking pretty bad. I’m good now, but I think I came to terms with my own mortality pretty early on (around when I was 16). As someone now rapidly approaching 30, if I were to go tomorrow I feel I’d be OK with that, though I would worry about how my fiancée would take it (or not, I’d be dead so I wouldn’t care about much of anything). I’m still looking forward to many more adventures but when my time is up, so be it.

I feel like I’ll be prepared later on but I’m fully expecting to not be ready when the time comes.

When I die, I won’t have emotions anymore.

I’m only scared of the pain that comes immediately before and the pain inflicted on my loved ones. Otherwise, if thinking purely selfishly, I wouldn’t mind much. I had a goodorun but now i’m exhausted of life in general.

If I was, I would BE dead. What is the advantage to being alive if you are no longer emotionally attached to it?

At this point I’m not sure I’m emotionally prepared to live.

It does scare me a bit, but I’ve thought about death and non-existence from time to time and gotten more comfortable with it. Not totally comfortable but it doesn’t horrify me anymore.

Couple months ago, I woke up to chest pain. Pain that I couldn’t get rid of. I’m going through my morning routine trying not to think about it, but it just keeps getting worse. Then it starts radiating out towards my left arm and I am feeling really nervous. I was going to text a friend, but then decided that it was stupid and just drove myself to the nearest emergency room (because of course I wouldn’t waste money on an ambulance, I’m an american, we live in hell). I came in feeling faint and dizzy and emotional and that blasted pain just kept getting worse. I remember the receptionist taking her fucking time.

Finally get a nurse to see me and she does an 12 lead EKG and has me hold up my sweatshirt while she’s applying them, and while she’s doing it, I end up fainting. I wake up almost immediately, but now I’m terrified. I told her I smoked a little weed to try to calm myself down, and now that’s all she cares about, wheels me back out into the waiting area so I can piss in a cup for her. At this point, I feel like they don’t care, my symptoms aren’t being taken seriously, and if I faint again, I’m gonna die in this shitty rural hospital.

So I piss in the fucking cup, fire off a few texts to people I care about, and I lay down on the hospital bed when just… a feeling of complete calm and relief descended upon me. Wherein I was like “well, shit happens, and not everybody can achieve all their goals. You were kind, and that’s all that really matters.” and there I was, just, completely accepting of what I assumed would be a swift death.

Then the doc came in and said “your EKG is fine, your troponin levels (when you have a heart attack your heart releases “help me” signals via this molecule, troponin) are normal, you just have a bad case of COVID.” I was floored. I mean, being sick is better than dying, but I was also just… ready to die? They disconnected my IV and shit and sent me on my way. Walked out into the night back to my car in such a daze.

But hey, I know when I die I’ll feel a sense of peace and relief that one can only dream of. Imagine winning the lottery and knowing you’ll be OK for the rest of your life. I imagine that it carries around the same level of peace I felt on that bed waiting for death.

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