How does one face your own death?
It is not something most people ever think about. Even after having gone to the funeral of a loved one, or seeing a fatal accident on the evening news people seldom consider their own guaranteed ending, living their day to day existence as if tomorrow is a certainty. Folks tend to live as if they always expect there to be a next day, at least, until they get some dire illness that gives them advance warning of their impending demise.
Most of us will be cruising along in our lives thinking about work, family, food, sports, books, etc, etc, and then “all of a sudden” we drop dead. No thoughts about it, no time to prepare or warn others. Be it a traumatic ending, painful but fast, or a sudden stopping of the heart, we all have the final breath awaiting us at the appointed time. There is no running from death for we are all born into mortal fleshly bodies that have a defined beginning and a definite ending.
No one cheats death.
Some people believe that via training or skill or plain old luck they have cheated death. They just don’t realize that those frightening times of destruction simply were not their appointed day to die. It was not their fate, for they still had days and weeks and months and maybe even years to live toward their purpose.
My son recently brought up a theory he read that states that we have a finite number of heartbeats, that every mammalian creature (and possibly all creatures with a cardiovascular system) have the same number of heartbeats that define the limits of our lives. A mouse, a dog, a human, a sea turtle, all have the same number of ventricular thumps per their species that will ‘lub-dub lub-dub’ until the count is run out. Most animals have about 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) beats during their lifetime. For humans lets call it 2,575,440,000 (2.575 Billion) beats* for your entire life, as long as you make it to old age and are not run over by a cement truck or eaten by a giant squid or something traumatic like that.
A mouse, a mut, a moose or a man all have the specific number of beats assigned to their species, limiting the length of their natural lives with a hard stop at some point. Since a mouse’s heart beats at 700 beats per minute they only live to be about 4 years old in a good environment. A dog with a heart rate of 140bpm 15-20 years. A moose can be similar to a dog. A human gets to live, on average, to between 70-80 years.
Once we hit the full number of beats, the clock stops ticking, the spring is unwound, the heart stops beating and the creature’s body ceases to live. They are then physically dead, any spirit they had is gone from the clothing of flesh, and there is no way to get it back inside.
Not trying to be morbid here, but this is one of the immutable facts of existence. Nothing is eternal in the manner in which we perceive it. Too many people focus on living their lives with no consideration of the ending, no concept that they have this limited number of heart beats, and all of the things they did as healthy young people that raised their heart rates to higher and higher limits through their lives has, while potentially being quite fun, used up a portion of those beats that could have lengthened their stay at L’Hôtel de la Vie Mortelle by a few more days.
Of course, even with that set number of heartbeats, that only accounts for living life sensibly and fortuitously not being splattered by a falling meteor or slipping into a shelf at the grocery store and being killed by a #10 can of pinto beans to the skull. In those cases, limitations to the length of life having nothing to do with the set heart rate of your species. It has to do with the set time written in the Book of Judgment, the inescapable day of your end, your fated destiny.
Death comes to us all.
It may not come for you for a long time yet, but there is an equal chance it is just around the corner after you read this, maybe even at the hands of a monstrous giant from deep within the earth…but probably something more common.
Therefore be prepared, for every day, every minute could be your last in this mortal skein.
Live your life with the other side of the river in mind.
Death need not be feared, but it must be acknowledged.
How will you make yourself ready for your own death?
*That is not the actual number of beats we are alloted. I just extrapolated from a human average of 70 beats per minute for 70 years…its just a guess, your mileage may vary
