Do you guys ever think about dying?

I have been lately. Nothing like wanting to die or hurt myself so don’t worry prematurely, my dear audience. I am well medicated enough to stave that off anymore.

My birthday was a week ago. It’s the first one I think ever that I’ve felt like it was mine. My mom’s birthday is a couple days after mine, so it was just another thing we shared. She died in 2017.

You can see how that mess turns into thinking about death a bit. My past, my mom’s death, my age, my health.

Yesterday, I learned the granddaughter of one of my wife’s coworkers died. She was 16. It was a car accident, so it wasn’t even something they could prepare for.
Imagine that from any perspective.
You’re the kid. You survived the lockdowns, and you were just staring life. 16 is half way through high school. You can learn to drive. You can finally find some kind of footing to figure out who you are.
And then all that was gone.

You’re the family, or worse, the parents. You have this kid, raise them. Watch them grow from a baby into a real, separate from yourself human being. 16 years of watching them become someone.
And then all of that is gone.

What do you do? What are you supposed to do? Raising a kid has to become such a big part of your life, and then it’s over.
It’s just… over. Who are you supposed to be, trying to figure yourself out again while grieving the loss of your child.
I was kind of on the other side of that. My mom and I had a very… unhealthy relationship, with her leaning on me more than she should have been, and then she was gone. She was watching tv with me and having a good time, and then that night she was in the hospital, and in the morning, I got a call saying the surgery on her heart had failed, an artery had collapsed, and she was dead.

I fell apart for years, and I had my partner to catch me. What do you do if the person that’s supposed to support you is also grieving the loss of their kid?

Anyways, enough on that, it’s not an answer I have.
Onto a lighter topic!

What do you think happens after you die?
I don’t know.
Is it scarier that there’s something else, or that there’s nothing at all?
Maybe it’s because I’m chronically sick and hurt pretty much constantly, but I wouldn’t mind if there’s nothing at the end. I wouldn’t mind a finish line, not just a mid point of the race.

I know that plenty of people believe in an afterlife. It gives them a reason to be morally good, which worries me some. To be good now just to get points for later, instead of just being good for its own sake.
That’s a different conversation.

I don’t think the afterlife is punishment or everlasting peace and downy feathers and harps. I guess if anything, I think whatever makes us us, that energy is just released back into the universe. I dunno if it ever comes back down, or if we’re one and done. Does it make us more special to be here just the once, or to be brought back?

I don’t know. This is just my usual meandering through a thought thing, I suppose.

Try to be good, just for the fun of it, okay?