english,
There are so many different ways to die.
Literary: How death comes to
There are so many different ways to die.
To me however, they can be categorized into three types.
First, the fast and sudden death. The kind that hits you out of nowhere, tripping you by the ankles and slamming you against the ground. It pulls you out from under your feet, leaving you too shocked to fully comprehend the weight of how hard you’ve been hit.
It was a freak accident that took her away. A ball going just the right speed, with our little girl on the swing at just the right peak.
My outstretched hands were inches away from her cracked skull on the park pavement. Just a millisecond too late.
Second come the slow deaths. The kind everyone secretly dreads from the bottom of their hearts. The one that rips you apart day by day, and you can only watch helplessly as they wither away.
That’s how my wife went, a 9 month long battle with stage 4 kidney cancer. Those 9 months of heartache felt like the equivalent of the 30 years we’d been together.
And then there are the worst kinds of deaths, the sudden slow death. The double whammy, the two-for-two, and the one no one is ever truly prepared to accept.
We’ve all seen reports like it. People slowly burning to a crisp, in a house fire caused by a careless neighbor, unable to be reached by firefighters because the fire was just a little bit too hot to get near. People wasting away for weeks in a too-small cave, all because they missed their footing by a millimeter. People holding their breaths in anxiety as the man with a gun shoots his way down the hallway, all because they just happened to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
You get the idea.
The frustration of knowing that their death was caused by something so unpredictable, and the anger of knowing that they didn’t even get the privilege of a swift passing, makes the fact that they’re gone all the more unacceptable.
Sadly, it’s a reality that those unfortunate among us have to face.
And a fate I have to accept as I plummet down from the 44th floor of my office building.
These are my final thoughts as I make my descent. About how unfair death is to take people so soon. About how unfair I am to them, for being able to choose how I go while they had no choice in the matter.
And that the only way to truly honor their deaths is to keep living, and embrace death when he finally comes.
But it is too late, for I am a selfish man, cheating death of its rules.
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