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By the way, you're going to die.

10:56 / 12.03.03

I've always assumed that when you are born, you have no innate knowledge that one day you will die. It must be something that you are told.
Now if that's true I'd imagine it must come as pretty big news. Probably the most significant and devastating thing you learn in the whole of your life. In terms of breaking news, this is the Big One.
Thing is, I can't remember it. And none of the people I've just asked does either. Is it possible that it's something we've just known all along?
Anyone here recall it as being earth-shattering revelation?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:02 / 12.03.03

Interesting question. As far as I recall, the fact of ME dying at some point was always known.

My parents, however, I thought were immortal for as long as I remember. Finding out my dad was gonna die, though I *must* at that point have understood the concept of death, was more scary.

I dunno. I prefer to think "I can't answer this question. I'm not gonna die. Ever." Even though it's patently bullshit.

11:03 / 12.03.03

I don't remember realising I was going to die but I'm wondering if it's a gradual thing, that we hear that we are going to die at an early age, but gradually our concept of death evolves as we get older. At an early age maybe we can't understand death in all it's seeming tragedy, I still remember this dream I had when I was really young, maybe four or five. I knew I was dead but death was actually a swimming pool and my parents were there talking to me.
But it seems like there should be a point when we realise that death is the end, but no I don't remember it.

11:08 / 12.03.03

Interesting question. I was about 6 or 7, I recall it kept me awake for a couple of nights. I just realised it myself for myself, I think. I can't remember exactly why or what caused it (the death of my grandmother?). I do recall going downstairs and asking my day about it and if there was an afterlife - being a devout atheist he said "nope" which obvioulsy cheered me up no end. In that kind of kid-logic way, it was very much tied in with being 70. Perhaps thinking about my age caused it?

11:18 / 12.03.03

I think I only realised my own and, in fact, other peoples mortality in a gradual way. I realised that there was such a thing as death but it was pretty abstract. Then I started to connect it to people and slowly, intellectually realised that it was connected to people I knew and perhaps even me. Sometimes someone I knew died and it became more real. The closer they were, the more impact it had.

Grasping my own mortality emotionally is something that has been a fairly recent experience, though.

11:52 / 12.03.03

I remember being terrified of my parents' mortality. I clearly remember asking them to promise not to die again and again and knowing that it was useless to do so but I can't remember feeling scared for myself. I must have known. I'll have to ask 'em if I ever mentioned it.

13:48 / 12.03.03

I remember being off school sick, lying in bed in the afternoon, when I was about 5 or 6, and coming across a picture in one of my brother's comics (I think it was Action or Battle) that really brought it into focus and scared me a bit.
The strip had a guy being caught in an explosion, one frame showing him lying prostrate on the ground, and the next showing him in the same position except as a skeleton. I can remember staring at this for ages and struggling to figure out what it meant and being quite disturbed.

14:05 / 12.03.03

Smoothly Weaving - have you seen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? Cos it has a speech in it that sounds really like your first post...

Not that that has anything to do with anything, really. Carry on.

14:07 / 12.03.03

My friend just got hit by a car. She's allright though, just bruised, poor thing. Its just how life is I suppose, and not everything can be prevented by just looking left and right.

14:27 / 12.03.03

Hmmm...I was about 6 years old as well. My class was on a school trip to the Hayden Planetarium, because we were studying the planets & stars & all that. I suspect the teachers didn't quite realize that the day's lecture, which was about the Sun, might have been a bit advanced for us wee nippers. (And I was the youngest in the class.)

So we're sitting in our seats looking up at the pretty stars & stuff and this soothing male voice is talking about the Sun only having a lifespan of 10 billion years, and we were about halfway through this cycle, so in about 5 billion years the Sun will die and there will be no more Solar System as we know it.

We were too little to understand the concept of 5 billion years, and so we just cried.

14:36 / 12.03.03

Deep, deep inside, I know I'm not going to die. Everyone else is, I guess, but not me.
Am I the only one who feels this way, however absurd?

14:48 / 12.03.03

Just you and Michael Jackson I think Mantis.

No, I haven't seen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead Deva. That's interesting because part of the reason I started this thread is that considering how widely explored and discussed issues of death and mortality are, it struck me as odd that that moment of realisation, above all others, isn't a more of a touchstone. In terms of life-changing, reference-shifting, Copernican moments, learning that one day you will not be must be huge. Shits all over finding out there's no Santa, or that babies don't grown in cabbage patches.

I'll have to try to find that speech. Do you know roughly where it occurs?

14:53 / 12.03.03

I worry about it more now than I did then, especially around airplanes. I don't think most people tell their kids that they're going to die. Like sex, kids learn about death from stories, or by observing it in their families and friends, but by the time it impacts them they're already pretty familiar with the physical process.

The first time I remember thinking about death was when I was very young and a neighbor fell down drunk and shattered her skull against a curb. She had been very kind to me, letting me stay in her apartment if I was locked out and so on, and it was a little weird when someone else moved into her place, but I don't remember being very troubled by it. Before that, there were those Hans Christian Anderson stories and the tall tales my stepfather told me about escaping from the Stalinist purges (he claimed he was exiled because he was a vampire prince, for instance) so I figured Susan was like one of those characters. The first time I remember being really bothered about death was when Ayla's adopted mother died in Clan of the Cave Bear -- I was seven, I think -- and I think it was Ayla's abandonment that bothered me more than her mother's death. Later, my stepfather's first daughter, who was about 20 years older than me, was killed, and I was more appauled by the whole extravagant show of grief by these crazy Russians than by her dead body or her soul's disappearance.

14:59 / 12.03.03

I remember when I was very, very young, I was somehow under the impression that people lived for exactly 100 years and then dropped dead at the start of the new century.

Which is rather an odd notion.

I think then I gradually came to realise that most people died before they reach 100, at some random point from about 60 onwards, but thus the revelation of mortality was never terribly frightening, as I'd kind of initially concieved death as a natural, ordered process rather than the whole load of random, scary shit it was gradually revealed to be, so there was no big shock, if you see what I mean..

Tryphena Absent

15:01 / 12.03.03

I never think I'm going to die either... I think it might be the arrogant side of my nature that just knows I'm going to live forever. The other half keeps trying to tell me I'm going to die young.

My granny was diagnosed with alzheimers about a year before I was born so I suppose my introduction to death happened over a long period of time. I knew that it would kill her eventually, so I knew that death existed, despite the fact that it took her 15 years to actually pass away.

15:15 / 12.03.03

Babooshka: I learned that the sun would eventually die when I was 18 and was very disturbed.

I still think I'm personally immortal of course. Seeing things like the Johnny Cash 'Hurt' video do remind me strikingly that death is out there... it probably helps that I've never really known anyone who has died.

15:19 / 12.03.03

I think Lurid's post distills much of what others have said. That the realisation was somehow gradual - a vague understanding, or image that progressively comes into sharper focus.
But this is strange isn't it? I mean, to know the proposition 'One day I will be dead' but not really understand what 'dead' means, is not to properly understand the proposition. So you might know that this 'Death' thing applies to you and not be too troubled by it. But can understanding what 'Death' means be anything other than a binary, Now-you-don't-see-it/Now-you-do kinda moment? The idea that one day it will be like it was before I was born isn't a very fuzzy one.
Thing is, that thought still fucks with me now. And I've had a chance to get used to it. I can't believe it didn't come as a humungous turd in my sand-pit the day it first hit me.

16:55 / 12.03.03

I think the factual realisation is probably gradual but I definitely remember the emotional wallop of realising, of a sudden, that I, previously suspected to be immortal and special was going to die too, sometime around the age of 10. My niece apparently has just undergone the same realisation at the same age, so maybe there's something about approaching puberty which might trigger this for some of us. In my case, I was ruminative and flat of mood for a long time therafter, which is why I remember it so well.

We first got a tv when I was five and that confused me about the fact of death, as applied to other people and animals. I knew what death was by then, having lived on a farm. But then came tv and I started to see people die heroically one week and reappear in another film or series shortly thereafter. I can remember discussing this with my dad when I was tiny and having trouble sorting it all out.

But, somehow, the sense of my own mortality, and a strong emotional response to that, lagged considerably behind the intellectual appreciation.

The Return Of Rothkoid

21:20 / 12.03.03

I think I've always been aware of death. I just have been ignoring it. I'm possibly more aligned with how I think I'm going to die, rather than when. Given my family history (and my goddamned father's robust nature) I'd imagine it's gonna be with Alzheimer's, unless a cure's found. And that's something that terrifies me.

A good friend of mine has multiple sclerosis, and I remember having a phone call with her when she revealed that she'd come to the point where she had realised that God wasn't going to step in and save her; that the disease would keep kicking her arse until she died. It's a fucking terrible thing to hear; she was strangely calm about it, had accepted it, but it was one of the worst calls I've ever had.

God, it's a good thing I'm listening to The Black Heart Procession now, isn't it?

Brigade du jour

21:36 / 12.03.03

Whoah dude, fantastic question.

I don't think anybody ever told me I was going to die, I think probably somebody I knew very well, like a family member, died and then it was explained to me that 'they'd gone away and weren't coming back', which could mean they've emigrated. But then as you get gradually older your understanding of death is modified to the point we're all probably at now.

I don't think this process ever stops. the closer you get to death the more your understanding of it evolves to the point at which maybe you accept it. A bit like the psychological stages you're supposed to go through when you discover you have a terminal illness. Except this takes a lot longer if you live to a ripe old age. I never really started thinking much about this on any kind of philosophical level until I heard somebody say (and this could be quote or a paraphrase) that "we weren't born knowing we were going to die. Somebody told us that" which is, of course, patently true. Although, maybe we weren't told exactly, just subjected to lots of evidence in the form of people we know dying.

Built-in mortality ... I just don't know, maybe immortality would be an interesting option but I know it would be wasted on me. I'd just go round getting into life-threatening situations for a laugh until I got bored, then read every single book ever written and watch every film ever made, because basically what's the fucking point if it isn't finite?

Sorry dudes, ended on a question there. Bad form. Naughty word too. I'm such a pottymouth.

01:22 / 13.03.03

I'd imagine it's gonna be with Alzheimer's, unless a cure's found.

Last semester, I was informed that Alzheimer's Disease won't be an issue in fifty years. Of course, science is so complex that you can't accurately predict what's going to happen in fifty days, let alone fifty years. However, this information came from a professor who has done extensive research on the aging of the brain. So if anyone is in a position to know, he certainly is.

01:36 / 13.03.03

Hmm... sometimes I find the thought of dying a comfort when life is cruel and nasty. (Is that morbid and fucked up? Maybe, I guess.) At other times, death does scare me and makes me deeply sad, but during my last health scare, I had Allen Moore's Snakes and Ladders to read, and somehow, it made everything seem okay. I felt my own mortality accutely when I had major thoracic surgery as a teen... guess maybe I just got relatively resigned to the idea of not living forever through that. As an old man once told me, "it's a one way ticket".

07:57 / 13.03.03

"You're kicked off a cliff when you're born. It's no use clinging the branches on the way on the way down". Alan Watts.

I've been meaning to start a thread on Death for ages, over in the magick. I'm very interested in how this might have informed people's sprituality, feelings about the afterlife etc. Will start a thread later today. It's certainly something that's affected me in this way. The realisation of death makes life sweeter in a way, it also seems soemhow fitting. Non-being fufills being. More later.

10:38 / 13.03.03

[Warning: cheap shots ahead]

Baz Auckland:

"I learned that the sun would eventually die when I was 18"

Blimey! How old are you now? I mean, how long have we got left? *Boom, tissshhh!*

Xoc:
"I definitely remember the emotional wallop of realising, of a sudden, that I, previously suspected to be immortal and special was going to die too, sometime around the age of 10."

Man, gutting to live beyond 10, only to discover it's time out for everyone when Baz comes of age. *Buddaba ching!*

Sorry.

10:48 / 13.03.03

I've started a thread in the magick and all you swine who never go there are invited to contribute.

Brigade du jour

21:37 / 13.03.03

I don't know if this is a different topic, but all this begs of me the question - would you want to know in advance exactly how long you've got? Has somebody asked this already? I don't recall it but what do I know?

Anyway, I don't think I'd like to know, even though I've always had a pathological curiosity about pretty much everything, especially these big metaphysical deals. Hmm. I've said for years I'd like to die quickly, painlessly and spectacularly and, I suspect, without knowing about it. Plane into a mountain, bus bomb, that kind of thing. I mean it's horrible and violent, but I think it's got to be better than cancer or something long-drawn-out.