Morbid Thoughts

The human mind cannot conceive of its own mortality very well. Oh, I mean we can comprehend the fact that we're going to die someday, but apprehending that fact, really grokking it, being in the presence of the fact that we will end someday... our brains aren't so much built to do that.

Which is a good thing, really, since constantly being aware of one's own mortality is a pretty quick road to being mostly useless as a living being. Mind you, being aware of it occasionally is not only okay, but can actually be a pretty wonderful and transcendent experience.

It is hard to get your mind to focus on its own ceasing, though. Your mind slips off of it and on to other things as soon as it can possibly get away with it. There are a few works of art that I know can get you there, at least for a moment: Six Feet Under, taken as a whole, has at least half a dozen moments where the whole thing just drops in, click-bang, and you know you're going to die, and there's no avoiding it. It lasts about thirty seconds, tops. Stephen King's The Green Mile has about a page and a half right at the end that take me there without fail every time. I once saw a really good production of King Lear that did it, too, right where Lear is fussing with Cordelia's button after she's been hanged.

I used to treasure those moments. I loved holding the thought of my own death in my mind, like a brief and slippery fish that was somehow also a precious jewel. It may seem strange for an atheist -- who has, as far as he knows, not much to look forward to after this life (well, not anything, really) -- to say that, but it's true. The perspective an understanding of your own transience gives you on the rest of your life can be energizing, even intoxicating. It can be beautiful.

I used to treasure those moments. I used to treasure them because they used to be rare.

I've been very fortunate that suicidal ideation has never been a part of my Mood Disorder. I've never felt a desire to kill myself, never felt the need to end it all, never heard voices telling me to do it. I have no intention of ever going gentle in to that good night.

I have a frying pan at my bedside for just such an occasion.

People that have to deal with suicidal thoughts have my sympathies; that must suck, big time. I'm thankful I don't have to put up with them.

Unfortunately, I have a similar, less potentially deadly, but still incredibly annoying symptom: morbid thoughts.

There are periods (anywhere from once to a dozen times a week, lasting anywhere from a minute or two to several hours), when I can't get the fact of my own death out of my head. It's incredibly present and real for me, and colors everything I see and feel.

Again, it's not a desire to die, but an awareness that I will, and a fear that time is slipping away far too fast. Sometimes I'm able to jump my mind off the track with conscious effort, but sometimes, not so much. At those times, my death is a big, obnoxious, noisy house guest that just won't take a fucking hint.

"I'll just be over here in the corner. Try and forget I'm even here."

This... awareness is incredibly annoying in general. But I especially hate how it colors the way I see my children. You know that slightly bittersweet tinge of "oh, they're growing up so fast" you get when they do something adorable you know they won't always do? That little undercurrent of "time flies" that leavens your love for them, and makes it even sweeter? Yeah. Imagine reversing the proportion of love and dread in that equation.

Catching a glimpse of your own death is empowering. Seeing your own death in everything sucks.

"I will show you fear in a handful of yarn..."

It comes and it goes, and fortunately it goes more than it comes. But it's interesting to me that it's a symptom I haven't heard much about from anything else I've read about mental illness, although my doc seemed to know what I was talking about when I said "morbid thoughts".

Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm going to go put some Blue Oyster Cult on repeat.

-- The Prolix Wag
You're gonna miss me when I'm gone. I know I will.