Death is terrible. Not just the end... but while some of us are lucky enough to expire with relative speed and peace, modern medicine and the tenacious manner at which we cling to life makes it horrible. It's naturally horrible, but we add horror to the process.

We do not die all at once. We lose pieces of what we love most. Our strength, our patience, our clarity, our independence, our senses, our memories, our loved ones..

Many of us will sentenced to confinement in a bed smaller than a cell in solitary confinement for the last weeks, months, years of our lives. An ever shrinking world of purposeless pain. I don't fear death as much as I fear a decade of nonambulatory pain. A decade of enslaving a loved one (or several) as my physical and mental needs demanded round the clock care. I fear watching my own failing health cause their health, careers, marriages, lives to fail one by one...

Death takes most of us piece by piece and takes the best parts of us first. I understand the nearly universal human need to believe death isn't the end but that we transition to some paradise forever. If we can't pump the dying full of morphine we can at least give them pleasant fictions.

This is dark but anyone reading this either has or will likely watch someone who means the world to them degenerate into a mess of pure suffering at some point and never come back.

My nightmare is our life extension technology gets more advanced without advancements in quality of life or cultural introspection about what we want out of existence and we all live to be 150 with the last 55 years writhing in pain, wallowing in our own shit, and begging for it to end.