I often see quotes from people like Fred Hampton about how they’d willingly die for the people. Or engage with Huey Netwon’s concept of reactionary and revolutionary suicide, or see how people like Daisuke Namba looked death in the eye and readily accepted it. And I really just…don’t get how they did it
I…I’m a coward. I know it. I don’t say it to myself enough and I don’t work on it like I should. But still, I can’t conceive not fearing death.
To start I dont want to fear. I don’t like the paralyzing sensation, the absolute inability for me to do something. When I was…more depressed than I am now, I often contemplated (i guess if im being honest, reactionary suicide). And what stopped me was not only my connection to society, but also just being afraid, afraid of what might come next. Is it nothing? Is it reincarnation? Am i eternally damned to some hell? What would even be the good option? I feel like a coward every time I sit down and contemplate that I didnt do it. And then I feel like more of a coward for wanting to take the easy way out. Nowadays it’s not that I want to die…its just that I wish I was never born in the first place.
But moving on. It’s not just fear of the unknown. I don’t want to hurt people. Not just people. Everytime I think about it, I imagine my cats wondering where I’ve gone, why they can’t see me anymore. Why I abandoned them. I wonder about my mom, about my family, what they’d think. Especially if I ended things myself. Would they hate me? Would they hate themselves? I don’t think they even know the extent of how I feel.
It’s basically every night now that I think about it. I think “what if this was it. What if I died now? What if I went to sleep and never woke up?” And I feel immensely scared. There’s so much I wish to do, wish to learn, places I wish to go. I feel like a failure for being so insulated, that if I died now that I wouldn’t have changed the world in my years of existence.
I’ve been watching 人民的名义 recently, and in one episode a charecter went over the details of his life in the sino-japanese war, about how he joined the CPC to carry explosives and use them against the Japanese. And I sat there watching and asking if I would do it. Would I have carried explosives under fire to destroy Japanese pill boxes or joined the Guomindang’s Dare to Die corps against the Qing? And honestly I couldn’t definitively say yes. I understand the inevitability of death, I understand that one day I will die. But I don’t understand how I accept it.
If you’ve read this, thanks for letting be honest. I know there’s more to the world than just me. But I don’t know how to tell my brain that…
I can’t speak for most people, but I know I personally put on a brave face whenever the subject of death comes up, but I also admit to anyone who cares to listen that I’ll likely go out of this world afraid if I happen to be lucid and aware of what’s happening.
I don’t think I’m a coward because of it though, I’m just a living being that naturally wants to keep on living.
As for laying down your life for a cause, that’s different, and imho, that situation just sucks, cuz usually your fighting something that fucked up your desire for a quiet simple life cuz of your race or religion or lifestyle, and now you have to set aside not only your dreams for the simple everyday life, but now you have to fight some authoritarian asshole who decided you and your loved ones deserved to die or be subjugated or be tortured, etc. In those situations laying down your life is still scary, but so is living, so laying down your life becomes entwined with a desire for you and/or your loved ones to survive and hopefully at least one of you gets to have that simple everyday life authoritarianism robs from you and so many people.
But now I’m just rambling again. Hopefully that offers up some insights. I don’t think you’re a coward, I think you’re human. To be afraid of death is normal regardless of the situation.
Life and death are intertwined though, and so just as it is important it is to ask yourself the question, “How do you want to live?”, it’s perhaps equally important to ask the question, “How do you want to die?”