Of all the things I can attempt to describe, the moments I will never be able to share are those when I begin to encounter death and then finally succumb to it. What is my role in even preparing myself to recognize it when it begins to appear? Will I know what it is as I’ve never seen it? Does it have a sound, a smell, a feeling?

I don’t want to imagine that the body shutting down will be synonymous with pain; maybe it’s just the motor slowly coming to a quiet halt. I think most people afraid of death are more nervous about excruciating pain where life’s exit is a landmine blowing off your face, metaphorically speaking. Too often during our lives, we are shown gruesome deaths that titillate our sense of the unknown and pique our anxiety about stepping into something we won’t like. What if natural death were a calm walk among the flowers?

Then what after that? Well, my sense of things suggests that what I consider me will be something relatively unknown afterlife as I’ve known it ends if there’s anything at all. Like a newborn infant, the sense of self will be unaware that an “I” is present. First, the new non-organic transitional me will have to adjust to the light that illuminates my new reality; time is likely my new sun. Somewhere out of this vast expanse of the future, maybe I’ll be able to recognize that time is emanating out of everything and that it’s infinitely expanding, taking me with it.

Until this new awareness forms, I must learn my way. Language, as I knew it, will mean nothing and so it is not required to try to explain what has happened or where I am. In that way, it’s kind of like the DNA in a seed that bursts forth in a flurry of activity that ends up sending a single tiny bud out of the murky depth of soil into the sunlight. Little do the leaves know at this time that a flower will someday grace the top of the stem that stretches into the sky and will require a flying insect, seemingly from another dimension and certainly from another species, to randomly wander along and fertilize it so its offspring will inherit its genetic blueprint allowing it to move into the future. So, what did the DNA think about its future? It did not think; it simply grew into its reality. This is what we do before consciousness takes hold.

Faced with being one with the universe, there will be no orientation, no image of God or his son. We will be looking into the energy and matter creation element known as time. We will have merged from surfing on the wave of time as an organic entity to being a thread traversing the unknown while we learn to orient ourselves in the framework of time without physical being. If communication exists it could be on the quantum level with a kind of attenuation to threads and bands that pulse with information that exceeds any ability of us in human form to describe such a place.

Of course, death can just as well be the final cessation of all with a drift into the darkness of nothingness. But we already know that there is nothing known as nothing where a real void might exist. Time, exotic particles, dark matter, and gravity are all flowing through every nook and cranny of every corner of the universe. Even particles that exist momentarily as they flitter in and out of their quantum state are, in some respects, ever-present. If they are “here” or “not here,” they still exist in the potential and a kind of certainty that they will again be known.

Regarding human consciousness, we cannot yet be certain of where exactly that might be, how large it is, and if it’s transferable or ever-present. While the connectome may prove one day to be the structure within our minds that supports our consciousness, will we, upon making that determination be closer to the center of precisely where the point of self is? Is it larger than a molecule, could it be smaller, or does it simply exist in time?

But all of this is about life, not death. I guess I just have to accept that I cannot write of that which I know absolutely nothing about. Death will remain elusive until it is as intimate as it will ever be, and I will then own it.