2009 was a pretty wild year for me. I, for the first time, started feeling the heat of the need to match the expectations set on me. After a few lively months from then, my grandfather was diagnosed with Cancer. In the seventeen months that he managed to pull off post the initial diagnosis, he went from being extremely optimistic about his recovery to urging my parents to consider euthanasia to end his pain. I was essentially staring at the face of death, making efforts to contemplate it, but these attempts only left me with more questions than answers on existence. Those days have left an interminable impact on how I perceive life, people and my relationships with them. This post is an attempt at documenting my thoughts on mortality and Mortality salience.
I was perplexed when I saw my grandpa pleading my family to take his life for the first time. How much unendurable pain should a person be in that he would choose to even end his life than having to live with it? However, once these requests became more frequent, I grew somewhat numb and ended up pondering over the chances of those requests just being an immediate response to the pain. "If offered a choice, the man wouldn't take it.", I thought myself. Though this idea seems cold-hearted, back then, I had never contemplated suicide or euthanasia. Death used to be something that came to those at a ripe old age which I thought I would never attain. But, now that death had evolved into a topic of casual discussion at the dining table, I needed some clarity to keep up.
One thing that kept constantly bothering me was the pace at which people moved on after his passing away. I wondered if people would move on the same way and at the same rate if I died tomorrow. Slowly but steadily, my focus shifted on how others perceived mortality. I ran experiments by casually bringing up mortality during conversations with friends at school or the playground. To my disappointment, they hardly cared about the subject. Some of my subjects sanctimoniously replied that only God gets to decide the "time of departure" of someone from the earth, thereby supporting my other hypothesis that religious people were dim-witted.
Ten years into introspection, I still am clueless about death or what it has to offer human beings. I no longer care about how people would feel when I cease to exist. My apprehensions are now around what happens to consciousness once I die. Does it get destroyed? Or does it get retained in some form? And if it does get retained, what is the use in holding on to it? Cut off from the outside world, having to deal with a lifetime of experiences and memories inside a trapped(or rather, liberated?) consciousness until the end of time would be petrifying.
When people claim themselves lucky to have been born during the most peaceful times on earth, I wonder what makes them feel it's okay to give up on it someday. How can they make peace with not being aware of what happens to this supposedly beautiful world once they cease to exist? Considering the advancements science has made in recent decades, I feel the secret to immortality will be unearthed in the coming centuries. And with humanity exploring ways to get out of the earth, reasons like there won't be enough place to accommodate everyone in this world become baseless. Contradictory to our assertions, we may not be the luckiest generation after all! That title would only suit the cohort born after humanity breaches mortality and successfully colonises other planets.
Living with Mortality Salience for ten years hasn't been particularly easy. It has taken a heavy toll on my motivation and self-esteem. Yet, I wouldn't by any means call it the hardest thing to tackle in life. For once, it is way better than being born with physical disabilities or living with mental complications like Schizophrenia. Secondly, I do believe that there is a touch of privilege associated with my journey. I can afford to worry about death only because I do not have to worry about not finding food on my table. I do not know which is worse, having to constantly worry about dying someday or worrying about starving the next day.