Ready to Die, Ready to Live

Image 8818 by 油姬

About eight months after Wendy died, I woke up in the middle of the night with the question, "Are you ready to die." It scared the shit out of me.

No! I am not, I thought. Why not?

Well, first, the house is a mess. I haven't done a lot of things I still want to do. There are loose ends that will need to be tied before I go for good.

But there are always loose ends and will always be loose ends. Your death can come at any time. It's probably decades away, but it might be only minutes away.

Being ready to die is not the same as wanting to die. Being ready to die is accepting the idea of your death as a concept. At the moment of death, all those loose ends become irrelevant and you go on.

But...what do you go on to? No one knows. My advice is to build your own afterlife, decide its governing rules and entrance requirements, and live the rest of your life in accordance with your own creation. The alternative, of course, is to live your life by the rules and requirements of someone else's creation. Your choice.

So that's it. Once you've accepted that you will die and that you can't say when, where, or how; and once you've created a destination for yourself, you are ready to die.

Once you're ready to die, theoretically you're ready to live.