I was about 12 years old when this happened, but I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a late evening and I was by myself in our home. I grew up in a country home far from most any thing. The neighbors lights were something on the horizon, but nothing close or easy to see. I went down to my parents basement to get something to eat out of the pantry, my sister was suppose to make me something, but she took off with her friends to have some fun. I stepped into the pantry and noticed the light was out. I turned and the door shut. It was in pitch blackness and I could see nothing, not my fingers, my feet or my body in any way. I tried to open the door, but the door was locked. I set there in panic. I was not scared of the dark, but at the moment I felt the pain of truly being alone. I set silent in this room of darkness. No noise, no light and nothing to even resemble a image my eyes could adjust too. I was facing the Witnesses image of death. As I have grown older in this life, I have learned that our thoughts of death greatly affects how we live life. We always heard we were running the great race, and the end was in site. What we did not realize though is that the end is always in site. We think and accept death for what it is to us every moment of every day. Whether we are happy, or sad, or even somewhere emotionally undefined. Death is there, we know it and we feel it and when we think it is gone ... we remember it again. So when I think of the Witness view of nothingness, of sitting in blackness of no conscience state. What happens? I step into the pantry of my past, I sit there wondering "why?" Why am I here and what brings such a sad and dark ending to a life of so much light? To me the answer is not about what a scripture says, but about what my heart says. My heart screamed out, "does this make sense?" and the answer was "no!!" Why would so many religions, so many people, and so many events point to the fact that death is not a empty black room of nothingness? Perhaps it is not about what we hear and about what someone tries to teach us, but about what we find on our own. When we come to terms with death, and when we accept our own personal view of what death is. We begin to live life and know what is in it for us, perhaps we develop a healthy fear of living and stop having the unhealthy fear of dying. Not long ago, I set at the bed side of a friend as she left this world. She breathed her last breath, blinked her last site of life and passed from one world to the next. I was not there to say, she went to heaven or went to the next plain of existence. I was there to say, "above all things, I know you have not gone to that dark closet and your mind has not made a journey unknown .... I only asked that she keep my seat warm in that next phase ... so that we may share a cosmic beer one day and laugh on why we never fully understood life, and were with people who overly obsessed on death." In the end, my favorite question to ask of people is to bring to them this thought, "are you afraid to die?" and if so "why?" Because to me life is no longer about what happens to me when I die, with me going to some place I could never control anyway. No life is about that young man who stood up in that pantry, felt around for a light bulb, screwed it in and saw the light of what was really happening and unlocked the door of his fears, and realized the true darkness was only in the mind that could not find the way out. So, "are you afraid to die?" My thought Dragon
Edited by - kenpodragon on 13 October 2002 2:55:21