Fear of Death

Writing Challenge: July 25, 2018

Prompt: What scares you most about dying?

Death itself isn’t a terrifying concept. Everything lives, and everything dies- that’s just the way the world works. Something so common, so universal shouldn’t be terrifying- yet in it’s own way it is. Death is universal and therefore familiar, but it’s also foreign.

We’ve all seen death in its various forms. We’ve seen plants, animals, and loved ones die. We know what death is. We’ve been it from the outside- and we’ve seen how different it can be for everything living thing, but there is one thing that’s the same across the board: once something dies completely it cannot come back. Death is permanent- and that’s what’s terrifying. There is no coming back.

We don’t know what to expect because no one can tell us in absolute certainty what it’s like. We can hope and dream, we can have faith in a God or an afterlife, we can contemplate for millennia, but we don’t know until our time comes. We know that it will come for us eventually. We know that there is nothing we can do to prevent it. We know that once it happens, there is no coming back. Death is the destination for everything. What’s worse- at least to me- is the fear and anticipation of waiting for an unknown inevitability.