Death in General

Death is a big one. And it's generally a pretty serious topic. That being said I'm not in the mood to take this seriously so I'm just going to talk about. I know a couple of people who've died since I met them. My mum's dad, for one, but I think everyone was partially relieved when Mike died. He'd developed quite severe dementia in the years leading up to it so I think it's safe to say that the Mike my mother's family knew and loved had died long before he stopped breathing. Which I think is possibly the saddest way to go.

And then there was my father's mother (on a side note, neither my mum's dad nor my dad's mum were their biological parents, but that's another, irrelevant, story) who died in 2003, so I think it wouldn't have been more than a year after Mike died. I'm going to be honest here, which is hard to do because honesty invites all-and-sundry to come kick you where it hurts, and say that I was scared of her until she died. I'm not saying I didn't love her, I can't quite remember because past emotions are harder to recall than past events, but she gave me the creeps. It wasn't her fault, se'd survived some horrible cancer or something that meant she practically bedridden for as long as I knew her, and I think she was a bit nutty. But she cared deeply for me, apparently, and I don't doubt that. Anyway, she died, somewhat ironically, on the way home from the hospital. She was undergoing that thing they do for renal failure, where they clean your blood through an external machine before pumping it back into the body. Death. It's amazing the shit we'll put ourselves through to stave it off.

Finally, there's George. My brother. He was born in and he died in 2002. My mother's fourth child, he died of sudden infant death syndrome a few months after he was born. I never got a chance to meet him because I was living in Queensland between 2001 and 2003. My poor mother though, she's been through so much sadness and turmoil in her life. It doesn't seem fair. But life and death are one and the same, and there isn't any justice to either of them.

I think I'll close this post with my ideal cause of death, which is what I wanted this post to be about before I got sidetracked. Because death is such a momentous and tragic event, because death signifies the end of one's existence I want to die from spontaneous combustion. It is my skeptical duty to say that spontaneous human combustion has little in the way of proper evidence and no known mechanism. However, if it exists, I want to spontaneously combust. Because no matter what the situation, SHC is funny. Fucking hilarious, actually, and I can't think of a single situation where it wouldn't cause me to chuckle. Say I'm just talking to someone, we're in the middle of a (probably) pointless and irrelevant conversation and suddenly I burn upwith no warning. The person talking to me would be mortified, and my death, like our conversation, would be pointless and irrelevant. But let's say I'mnot talking to someone. I'm lying in a bed, dying of cancer. My family is gathered to say a tearful farewell and then 'poof', I just explode. Face it, it would be funny. I suppose spontaneous combustion is my favourite C.O.D because it is the ultimate non-sequiter.

The Cad