Here's an odd experience I had while I was on hiatus. My attitude towards death is pretty laid back. It's going to happen to all of us. It sucks, but that's the way it goes. I don't fear it, exactly. Maybe the how sometimes, but never the fact of death itself. I learned at a very early age, perhaps in a cruel manner, that death is inevitable, and I learned to live with that.
But while I was watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel a few weeks ago I had this sudden feeling. I hadn't felt it since I was maybe ten? Yeah, ten at most. Fear gut stabbed me out of the blue, and I thought, what if I die right now? And it made me think of all the nothing that came before my birth and the nothing that would come after my death, and the thing that bothered me the most was that death would probably come when I was busy doing something.
That it would be really inconvenient. I'll be busy. I've got a lot of stuff going on. When it sneaks up on me, I'm not going to finish whatever task I'm doing at the time. Since I believe there is nothing after this, I felt all the regret I would have felt if there *was* something in that moment.
It was a weird feeling, and it happened again today while I was watching the new Indiana Jones movie. Sitting there in the theater thinking that it would be really inconvenient for me to die right there. Would anyone notice in the dark theater? Maybe when the credits started to roll and my two friends wondered why I didn't stand up. And what then? Who would pick up my car and bring it back home? My brother wouldn't know how to handle something like this. My aunt would have to travel all the way from East Moline to have them transport my husk to Elmhurst (I was near Bolingbrook at the time), and it would all be one big inconvenient hassle.
There was a teeny tiny part of me that found an odd comfort because the feeling did remind me of what it was like to be a kid. I was a fearful child, which is pretty funny if you know me now. It turned back the clock for me, my own little inner Dial of Destiny.
Of course, only now am I thinking that my survivors wouldn't have felt it was a hassle. They would probably be too lost in grief. But it helps that I wrote the thing about not multitasking. Remembering my own words about unfinished work brought me back to the ground.
Oh yeah, the movie was pretty good. Better than Crystal Skull by far, although I imagine there will be a lot of people complaining about the ending. Anyway, since it's a grim GF tonight, let's end it with my ranking of Indy's movies.
1. Raiders (obviously)
2. Last Crusade
3. Temple
4. Dial of Destiny
5. Crystal Skull
No comments:
Post a Comment