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death in an apocalypse

How would you like to die? Or, how would I like to die?

At the age of thirty-five, I like to think I am in possession of as pain-free a body as I could ever hope to have, in my brief mortal life. It is only downhill from here. Diabetes, high blood pressure, toe amputations, brittle bones that crack painfully with every accidental stumble – my elders have illustrated painfully the realities of the latter decades of fragile human flesh.

Not to mention what everyone has been whispering since Covid: this is the End-times.

Let's look to historical examples, shall we? “How to die” is a question that has, ahem, plagued the Biblical king David (he of “David versus Goliath” fame).

Let's see how David responds.

When David got up in the morning, the word of the Lord came to Gad the prophet, David’s seer, saying, “Go and speak to David, ‘This is what the Lord says: “I am imposing upon you three choices; choose for yourself one of them, and I will do it to you.”’” So Gad came to David and told him, and said to him, “Shall seven years of famine come to you in your land? Or will you flee for three months before your enemies while they pursue you? Or shall there be three days of plague in your land? Now consider and see what answer I shall return to Him who sent me.” Then David said to Gad, “I am in great distress. Let us now fall into the hand of the Lord, for His mercies are great; but do not let me fall into human hands.” (source: 2 Samuel 24, NASB.)

To not die by human hands. That is insightful. Humans may be well-intentioned but they may inflict more pain than relieve it!

C.S. Lewis seems to concur with King David:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

(Source: “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)“)

I feel blessed that I can have distance from moral busybodies. How priceless is this distance! A million dollars cannot buy me such peace of mind.

I want to spend my last days of health, like Mary Oliver, in her poem, The Summer Day
or like Walt Whitman, in his poem, When I heard the learn'd astronomer. Spending my final precious hours of God-given life, with twitching grasshoppers in the day, and with blazing stars in the night.

It is a beautiful world out there.

And, then, after the final hour, what happens upon my death? As the famous monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, says,

A cloud never dies.

Oh yes, in the mean-time, it is morally necessary that I feed the hungry, and warm the shivering-cold – within my natural limitations.

Khalil Gibran informs us:

the time and the place may change, but humanity's hunger and thirst for the wine of pure love never changes.

And what is love?

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (source: 1 Corinthians 13, NIV)

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