You Will Die Tomorrow

Everyone's Story Ends Exactly the Same

Tomorrow, you are going to die, and while I don't relish my role as the bearer of bad news, you probably ought to know and perhaps do some soul searching about the implications of your impending date with oblivion. It is work, and not the fun kind, so you will want to do what most people do and avoid it, but that would be a bad idea because this work is necessary. If you persist in avoiding it, you run the risk of ending up an old man who is scared of death, and there’s nothing more pathetic and pitiful than that.

With the exception of my childhood, my existence on this planet has passed in the blink of an eye. Childhood seemed to last forever, so assuming most people experience childhood like that, I would say to you that if you survived your childhood, or even if you were lucky and you had a good childhood in which an adult paid the bills and cooked the food and paid mind and money to the acquisition of garbage bags and Windex and car insurance premiums, you ought to try to realize that you've already experienced the best that existence has to offer. (That's more bad news, that the best is already behind you. That is but one of the many cosmic swindles.) Further, if your caretaker took an interest in you with a mind to raising you into a capable adult and taught you how to properly bathe yourself, how to balance your checkbook, and how to carry yourself with some modicum of restraint and self-discipline, then you probably ought to at the very least buy that person lunch with the aim of thanking him or her for the effort. Some gratitude seems in order.

I remember sitting in my high school study hall, reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and dreaming that one day I'd have the chance to adventure like he did. I'd imagine going off to college and backpacking Europe during the summers, staying at hostels, eating cheeses, drinking wines, and fucking hairy French girls.

Sitting there, it seemed as if I would never get out of that place, that hellish redneck high school in rural Mississippi that, as it happens, was better than pretty much any public high school that exists today, but I didn’t know that at the time, so I sat in study hall and daydreamed about being elsewhere.

Back then, sans Internet, my father would call the university bookstore and order a ball cap for me, from places that seemed so exotic, so interesting, places with names like Slippery Rock University, the University of Southern California, the The University of Oregon with its Ducks, Arizona State University with its Sun Devils, and many others. (I sometimes wish I still had all of those hats.) For undergrad, I ended up staying close to home because of scholarships and in-state tuition. Travel was expensive. (Since I called it “undergrad” you know I have some sense about “grad”, and I was able to student-teach and explore a few exotic pockets of the country like Kansas and Pennsylvania. ;)

Once I hit 25, give or take, it took exactly three seconds before I woke up one morning and I was 45, and I know that when I blink again I’ll be 65, and then I’ll blink again and I’ll be dead. It might happen tomorrow. In fact, in this more cosmic and realistic view of time, it certainly will.

You might notice, if you look around, that people are exquisitely good at dying. You might also notice, too, like our wizened and unwise college professor linked above that people are scared of dying. You might also notice, if you really do some reflection/comtemplation that people are the only species on Earth that has the ability to delude itself into thinking that the dying only happens to other people, and in light of the covid “pandemic” that airborne viruses are something we can control and avoid, and that trading freedom for "safety" is a no-brainer and a pretty cherry deal. More than anything except maybe dying, the human being’s chief skill seems to be its propensity for and facilty with self-delusion.

You are going to die, probably tomorrow, and you better come to terms with that and stop behaving like such a pathetic coward.