How do you view death?

i liked that movie!
not as good as the other three though...

I was moving into the after life.

Due to shoddy paperwork, I was rejected.

haha!

That's how I was classified 4F. A blessing.

I often post that if I had my druthers, I druther not die at all. However, should I become incapacitated, so that I no longer function in a meaningful way, I would then opt for death. I don't want to be a chunk of meat getting fed through a tube and drooling while my wife sits by the hospital bed. She has better things to do than that.

Not afraid of death per se, However, I wish the technology of suspended animation was sophisticated enough for me to see two things i) wake up approximately 4 billion years from now and see the end of Earth - something or other about the Sun dying and ii) see what homo sapiens look like - modern homo sapiens have been around 200,000 years, imagine what we'd look like in 4 billion!

if it was n´t the case of being extinct for aeons you probably would n´t have the physical organic apparatus to even recognize it...

And what would I be trying to recognize again? And what physical apparatus?

1 - Certainly would n´t be Homo Sapiens...
2 - Your senses.

That last reply made me vomit in my mouth a little. Exciting and slightly tangy!

uh...
yummy?

Good regurgitated product can be oddly sweet and savory all at the same time. Depending upon factors such as chewing and length of digestive tract resting, it can also contain large pieces which remind you what you last ate.

I will die fairly soon, or live on with Alz, which I so hope not.

Thirteen year olds asking how I view death in a spray pattern of threads strike me as jolly scumbuckets, sorry, Hamilton. The 'Let's play' mode can be annoying from here at my age.

On the other hand, I remember being thirteen and sixteen and nineteen, so I'll take my irritation back.

Some people on a2k deal with this matter of death regularly.

So tell us, Hamilton, what you yourself think of death. And don't be cute.

I am in my thirty's now, still a kid, but I can relate to what you said...your wisdom is welcome.

Thanks, Fil.

It is just how it is. Close.

I am good to go. My life has been exiting at times, boring sometimes, and busy on occasion. At my age one must be prepared to transition.

we alway's should be...
have you read neil gaiman's the sandman series? it has allot of insight on such things.

A friend sent me the following, regarding death and our attachment to the things of life:
"My grandmother, my spiritual teacher, used to tell me that the pain we associate with the great change called death arises from our innumerable selfish attachments. One day she illustrated this in a simple way by asking me to sit in a chair and hold tight to the arms. Then she tried to pull me out of the chair. She tugged and pulled at me, and I held on tight. It was painful. She was a strong person, and even though I held on with all my strength, she pulled me out.
Then she told me to sit down again, but this time not to hold on anywhere, just to get up and come to her when she called. With ease I got out of the chair and went to her. This, she told me, is how to overcome the fear and pain of death. When we hold onto things – houses, cars, books, guitars, our antique silver teapot – we get attached and tied down."

I believe it is a great strength, the ability to "let go" even of our departed friends and loves.

I have often wondered who we cry for at funerals.
Is it the dead?
If we believe that the dead person had a good heart and we believe in heaven and hell, we would probably believe them to be in heaven, and so there should be no reason to mourn for them.

If we don't believe such things, if we believe that the person simply doesn't exist anymore, then why should we mourn him? He has no existence, and can be neither happy nor miserable. If we believe this and still mourn we are, to put it bluntly, upset about nothing.

The only answer I can come up with of why we mourn our dead is that they are lost to us.
So we are not mourning death, we are mourning attachments that have been severed. All in all, it is selfishly motivated. It may sound harsh, and knowing this may not make it any easier to lose loved ones, but we do not actually mourn our dead, we mourn the living who remain...