The thought of death is terrifying to me. You would think, being a medical student, that it would be natural... In some ways it is. But in almost all ways it's not. The permanance. The feeling of never feeling anything ever again. The emptyness. The abscence of anything. That scares me. I will be zero. Just a memory in someone's mind.
It really came home today when one of my professors, in Neurology, said it quite plainly: We are only future cadavers.
In many ways, I had only dealt with death superficially. It happened to other people. My job is to help prevent it, or if I can't, I am to make it as comfortable and palatable as possible.
Now I understand why people want children so badly. It is their way of cheating death. The one way of outliving one's self.
But still I can hardly imagine myself dead. The stagnation of it all. I would think it boring, but that implies consciousness. I can only hope that the purpose of my life is to provide comfort to those who need it the most. To those who have nothing else. To those who know the end is near.
