31, please

• 31: Talk about what you think death is like.

I was raised Catholic and was told from a very early age that there was this awesome place above the clouds where you hang out with your dead relatives forever. Then bit by bit I sloughed off the beliefs of my religion… but the idea of some form of afterlife was one I couldn’t shake. My understanding of my consciousness was as one continuous narritive with no ending. I couldn’t imagine that just because I die I would stop thinking, stop observing, stop dreaming… so there must be some place for all this to go once my body is gone.

Then I had major surgery that kept me under anesthesia for over eight hours, and I developed retrograde amnesia. My time under wasn’t dream-filled or given any scale of time. It was just an emptiness of coherence, a blacking out of any thought that could have easily gone on forever. I think that’s what death is like. It is a final surrender of thought as the body and mind simultaneously end.