I want to tell you about something that happened to me recently, not to worry you but because it taught me something I want to share while it's still close.
I have a condition — shortness of breath, sudden and severe, the kind that arrives without warning and takes over completely. The doctors have their own name for it. What I call it privately is practicing how to die. Each attack is brief — an hour at most — but while it lasts there is nothing else. Just the struggle for the next breath, and the question of whether it will come.
What I want to tell you is what happened inside me during it. Not panic. Not the scrambling thoughts I might have expected. Something quieter. I found myself in conversation with the fear, and the conversation went like this:
Death is testing me again. Fine. I have been testing death for longer. Before I was born there was non-existence, and I felt nothing. No suffering, no loss, no awareness of absence. Whatever comes after will be the same condition as what came before. The lamp is not worse off when it is extinguished than before it was lit.
On either side of this brief, difficult interval of living, there is deep peace. I have already been there. I simply don't remember it.
I am not writing this to perform equanimity. I am writing it because I genuinely found it steadying in the moment, and I think it might be steadying for you too, filed away somewhere, available when you need it. The fear of death is mostly fear of the unknown. But non-existence is not unknown to us. We came from it. It was not terrible. It was nothing — which is precisely the point.
The breathing eventually slowed and stopped its siege. I sat for a while in the unsteady peace that follows, feeling my breath come back to something like normal, aware of it in a way you only are after it has been taken from you. Even now there's a hesitation in it. A reminder.
I don't mind the reminder. It keeps things clear.
The wise man is never thrust out of life unwillingly — because he wills to do what necessity is about to force upon him. He escapes compulsion by choosing what he cannot avoid.
That is what I want for both of us. Not to be unafraid of dying because we don't value living — but to value living so fully, and to hold it so honestly, that when the time comes we can meet it as something we were always moving toward rather than something arriving to take us by surprise.
Yours, breathing more easily now,