Ha, ha, ha, I'm gonna die, and I don't care...

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Ok, now that I got your attention, and I apologize to anyone who got upset with my title, but it really does bother me, and I do care.

The problem is that writing stuff like this is what helps me to deal with it:


What's It Like to Die?
written by me on 2019-01-23


TODAY, IN 1971, Charles Manson and his buddies, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel, were convicted in the First Degree Murders of Abigail Ann Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Earl Parent, Sharon Tate Polanski, Jay Sebring and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

Yesterday, on January 24th, 1989, Ted Bundy was executed for the murders of 12-year-old Lake City girl Kimberly Leach, and Florida State University students Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman.

All that death and mayhem got me thinking about my own mortality. I'm not a spring chicken, and unless I somehow live to be 120, more than half my life is definitely over. It worries me of course, but at the same time, I also realized I wouldn't have to work, pay my rent or a mortgage, taxes, buy food, remember to take a shower, or ever have to care about politics again, and in a way, that's comforting.

That last minute of life is what I'm really worried about. What was I going to think, say, or do with those last sixty seconds?

It's morbid, I know, but that's never stopped me before. For example, let's say that somehow you've been grabbed by a serial killer, they're strangling you, you're struggling, but finally give up. What are you thinking about?

You have a better chance of dying in a car crash, of cancer or of a heart attack, rather than a serial killer, but the question still remains the same.

You have sixty seconds to live, and you know it. What are you going to be thinking about? Loved ones, lost opportunities, regrets, fear, horror, or just glad it's finally fucking over?

Talking about shit like this is why I don't have any friends. That and my need to argue about everything and only care about what I think, like especially those last sixty seconds.

This isn't something that just popped into my head either. It's been a life long journey really, because I've always wondered about it. As a matter of fact, it's one of the reasons I've spent a lot of time researching serial killers. What were their victims thinking in those last few seconds, and what did they say and do?

Sometimes my research scares the hell out of me, and sometimes it's interesting, but mostly, it's stupidly ironic. Spending your whole life thinking about that last minute is beyond ironic and stupid. It's stupidly ironic, but it's also what I do best.

In my defense, Forbes did make a list:

40 Things To Say Before You Die by Jessica Hagy.

It's also why I did a presentation about death for a college developmental psychology class. It focused on the last things people said before they died. I also passed around a magazine filled with pictures of gravestones and their epitaphs.

Some of them were funny, and I got an A of course.

I'm sure you've read about many of the last things people have said and epitaphs too, but the one that really got me was not even a human one. It was from a parrot named Alex.

He had a vocabulary of over 100 words, but what was exceptional was that he seemed to understand what he was saying.

The last thing Alex said before he died was I love you to his trainer, Irene Pepperberg. He said the same thing every night, but it was still nice, and kind of sad too, ya know?

As a final word and also as a shout out to all my fellow Lovecraftian freaks out there, I was reading through an Ask Reddit Answer Page about funny last words. One of the answers, from someone named educated_guesst, told about a time when he was studying to be a pilot, and his instructor told the class that if he was going down, and there was no chance in hell of survival, "he'd say over the radios 'look at the size of those tentacles!' And the FAA and NTSB would be so confused..."
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