Why we can't imagine the moment of our death

Thumbing through a recent issue of The New Yorker last night, I came across a thought-provoking paragraph about mortality in a personal history piece, "The Aquarium," by Aleksandar Hemon.

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that the mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.

Comments

[B. Yost]

Death is nothing. Nothing at all. We are amalgamations of particles, like billions of tiny bright crystals. This can be seen with practice. Don't ask me how.

When death comes this "crystal amalgamation" expands over the earth, the sky and cosmos without end.

You become like a crystal cloud ever expanding into the infinity from which you came, in which you are now and always will be.

AHHHHHhhhhhhhh.....!

[Alex]

Yost, your idea is quite scientific indeed. We are composed of atoms. When we die, our atoms disperse into the soil, enter a plant, eaten by and become a part of somebody else, ascend as water vapour to form a cloud, a few of our atoms might even escape into outer space... And that is the Buddhist understanding Thich Nhat Hanh's "No Death, No Fear" explains too. When conditions are right, a cloud is formed. When those conditions no longer exist, the cloud disperses or rains down. The cloud is manifested, not born, and disappears, not died. So is a human.

[Alex]

"...if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence..."

But aren't we experience the transition from consciousness to nonexistence of that consciousness evey night (if not suffering from insomia)? No need to imagine.