Facing death

When you die

And you have time to realize it, there is this short and last moment of perception. A perception not of what happens around you, but what is about to come to you, and only you. It's not a thought, because thoughts can be controlled, thoughts have words and images. It's not quite a feeling either. It's like a wind that's standing still, within the core of the core of your being.
Your body is already past feeling anything. Your mind is past thinking. It's that moment just before you're really dead, that last bit of brain activity, that gives you something that isn't quite a thought, but also not quite a feeling, yet you realize it, but not knowingly, not in a way you could define it; your body is too far gone to even make a facial expression to go with it.
It's that final fleeting moment of realization. It's over. It's too late, you're past all hope or help, you are about to be dead, and your being, your joys, your pains, your friends, your family, your world, your projects and dreams, your past and your future, everything will be irrevocably over in an amount of time that knows no name and that has no unit or measure, just like this realization that is nothing and everything.

That sadness, that final surge of struggle in your deepest core that does not want you and your world to end. And the sadness that it will all end regardless. Nothing compares to this. It's not fear, not resignation, not anger, just the sadness of the profound, final, and pointless realization that the world that you've made and that you've been - every person creates, is, their own world - is now ending and nothing can save it.

You can only put it into words if you survive to think about it. You can't relate to or internalize it unless you've felt it. If you hold on to it, it instills a fear of, and a rage against death in you, an absolute rejection of your mortality, and a desperation to live and to make your life matter and to not waste a second. This is at the same time motivating, and also paralyzing. This fear that the world, a unique world everybody creates, will end when you stop breathing. You cling to each breath knowing one will eventually be your last and you will encounter that feeling again. You fear and hate the thought of you ending. You're no longer able to imagine the world without you in it, because the world you know, is the one your eyes have seen, your hands have touched, and your mind has processed. Any other person will not live in the world of your life. They live in their own. You end and your world, a world, ends. Death no longer feels natural or acceptable. Not your own. Because with you, the world ends.