how do you cope with mortality??

this may get long.

some times i can not turn my brain off. i think about death a lot and it really scares me. i can not find a way to calm myself. i constantly think about having a heart attack or getting cancer and then having to die and leave my beautiful wife here and it scares me. take that into consideration all the death around me(most people too)

my father just passed in august of liver failure. my father in law has pretty advanced md. my sister in law is getting into serious ms. her mother just died of cancer and her father is dying now so everyone is constantly talking about it.

tonight my mother called and said she had to talk. my stepfather has cancer. he pretty much raised me. he is a mailman and he was at work and was tired, itchy, i guess he couldn;t really walk straight and he couldn;t lift his mail bag so they made him go to the doc. they gave him all the tests and they checked his blood and turns out he has cancer.
just like that. cancer.
myeloproliferative disorder is what it's called.
that is the "family" but there are 6 kinds of it but 4 re the most common. worst case is death in 3-5 years. better scenerios are upwards of 10 years with medicine. either way it's bad. it's going to take 10-14 days to get the bone marrow results back so my mother and step father have about 2 weeks to wonder if they have 3 more years together or 10.
i feel so bad for my mother and my little brother. my little brother is 11 but i have 3 older brothers and they are all in the service for the next 4-5 years so that means my mother and little brother are home alone with step dad while he gets worse and worse.

how do you cope with things like this? sometimes i literally come to tears cause i get so worked up about death.


sorry for the bad structure and rant.

...my heartfelt condolences for all you are going through. Honestly, your pain has brought a tear to my eyes.

Originally posted by Boondock78
how do you cope with things like this? sometimes i literally come to tears cause i get so worked up about death.

As painfull as this is for you, tears and sorrow are an appropriate response. All I can do is to repeat for you my own thoughts that have helped me cope with death, and hope that they help. (this is a repeat post for those paying attention):

1. You die every night and don't even care. When you go to sleep, your consciousness terminates entirely during parts of the night when you are not dreaming. When you wake up the next day, it isn't the same "you", but a new consciousness formed from the same physical body. The previous day's "you" is dead forever. Yet, it doesn't bother me in the least to go to sleep. Sleep is sometimes referred to as 'little death'.

2. If you have ever had surgery that required you to be paralyzed, you will undergo a strange experience. You will be awake one moment, and find yourself waking up in recovery the next, with no perception whatsoever in between. It's weird, but not the least bit frightening (at least it wasn't to me). Death will be like that, except for the waking up part.

3. When you die, you will return to the state of nonexistence you were in before you were born. Does the idea of not having lived eternally prior to your death bother you? If not, then why does the thought of not living eternally after your death bother you? It will be no different than it was before you were born.

4. You are part of the universe. When you die, although you will no longer be conscious, the universe will still exist, and that which was once you will still be part of the universe.

5. If the universe as we see it is basically a self consitent subset within unbounded reality, then every moment of the universe as we know it will exist in some sense eternally. You will exist again as yourself in another instantiation of the universe. This is not much different than going to sleep and waking back up again. Granted, this is speculative, but if you must latch onto some way of existing forever, you might as well grab hold of a secular mechanism that is not inconsistent with current scientific thinking.

6. Can you imagine how boring it would become to live forever? It would be intolerable unless you could forget things. But if you could forget things, then over an infinite eternity, the you of today would no longer exist anyway, as all memories would be lost and replaced with something else from the eternal domain.

7. Finally, if you can come to terms with innihilation, when you lose a loved one, or when you face your own eminent demise, your doubts about annihilation will bring comfort rather than fear. If you latch onto some belief in an afterlife, your doubts about that at the time you need that hope most will bring stark terror. Because of this, acceptance of annihilation brings counter-intuitive peace at the time you need it most. Having experienced the death of loved ones as a believer and as an atheist, I'll simply relay my own experience as to the truth of this - for what that's worth.

If you want to PM me, I'd be happy to take this discussion offline.

^^^^pretty good post. thanks for reading my post but it still freaks me out. about the closest i have come to easingm y mind is i ask mself"what was it like before you were born?"i amagine that death will be a lot like that.

i am afraid of dying and leaving my wife behind but i am also afraid of her dying and leaving me behind. i wish we could both lie down on the bed and go to slepp and die together in each others arms like in the notebook.

i have had surgery before. a few actually for my back. it is a wierd feeling. i remember being on the stretcher and the nurse puts the mask on and she tells me to count backwards from 10. the next thing i remember is the nurse in recovery saying my name trying to wake me up.

another reason i have a hard time with the whole death thing is i can't shut my brain off. there are so many things out there that can kill you and i am afraid that i am going to get one of them. i don't really think there is a god and a heaven but i sure want there to be and i hope there is. it's hard to believe in something like that when you see a man that raised you and took care of your mother and you could pretty much say that he is a real good guy. so why not lets give this good guy that has a wife and 5 kids, a guy who is 44 years old friggin cancer. whats the deal with that?
how am i supposed to take care of my mother through this and after? i have a little brother that is just in 6th grade and 3 others at various military bases. i am married and i have a serious back condition. it causes me great pain and i have to take morphine and fentanyl for it. i have already had surgery and am probably going in for another so i am very limited in what i can do cause it's hard for me to move sometimes but i have to be there for her.
what about my little brother? what about when he is 15 or 16 and he is starting to act out and rebel or run with the wrong kids or mis treat our mother. what if he is a great kid but developes serious problems due to the fact that he is about to watch his father whither away and die.
what kind of cruel game is being played at our expense?
the earth is 4.4 billion years old. the solar system is something like 13 billion and the earth has another 4.4 billion or so to go.
life has been on earth for millions of hears, humans for thousands.
there is so much out there and so much time why is it that we, the most intelligent life form on the planet only get about 90 years if we are lucky? closer numbers would be like 76. thats the average. 76 years. the first 6 you probably won't remember. the next 11 or so will be good maybe and then you get to start work. then you get to spend the next 50 years working for at least 8 hours a day and sleeping for at least 4 hours of every night. factor in all the times you are sick or whatever and out of our 76 years on earth how many of those years do we actually get to enjoy?
why does it seem like we were put here to work to be able to afford a roof and a place to sleep only to have to get up and do it all over again.

if our time does not seem short enough lets factor in things like tsunamis, terrorist attacks, hurricaines, floods, freexes, extreme heat, extreme cold, war, famine, hiv, cancer, std's, heart disease, brain tumors, blood disorders, accidents, and about a million other things that could and more than likely will shorten our precious little time here.

life is very hard for a human being on earth. we have complex thoughts and we feel pain. we form bonds. we have to go to school. we have to work. along with that we get to love and be with people we care about. people that make us feel good ultimately to watch them suffer or to get the phone call out of nowhere saying your loved one was just mowed down by a drunk driver. maybe you get to leave them behind after you fight a terrible disease.


thanks for reading and sorry about all the mistakes in grammar. my brain is going 100mph in all directions and it's 2:30am here.


see you all later. gonna go spend about 7 hours of life that i won't remember and i won;t be able to get back.

Dear Boondock78

I have read your messages with much empathy. I too have lost a close family member recently and many of my family and friends are plagued with serious illnesses.

I will be very blunt, and I hope that I do not offend, but it is clear to me that your life situation has resulted in you becoming a victim of your own mind. This is not unusual, and considering the circumstances, quite understandable. However, it appears that your fears and thoughts of death are invading your day to day living and this is a problem.

A brilliant book which I have passed onto my dear friends that I thoroughly recommend is "The Power of Now" by author Eckhart Tolle, who has overcome his own demons to attain higher conciousness, is a "must read".

This book has sold over 2 million copies and is a life changer!

This book will teach you to use your mind as a tool, but not let it control your thoughts! And this aint easy, but once mastered, will completely change your outlook on life, your relationships, your reactions to external influences and much much more.

When you are surrounded by sick people, they will literally drain your energy, you will need to learn how to engage some type of psychic protection so that you can enhance positivity in your life.

Anyway, I could go on, and on, and on ... and I usually do ... LOLOLOL



But please, see if you can find this book, most libraries should have it. And for now, focus on the positives of being alive, how blessed you are to be living on this facinating planet called Earth! Get outside and spend some time appreciating nature, that is an excellent way to lift your mood and enhance positivity. Break it down, appreciate the little things! Stop obsessing over dying, its gonna happen, but life is too short, so lets live it.

My 2 cents worth!

Hope I have been of some help.

Best regards,

Dobbie.