"The consciousness of death is the consciousness of the perpetual postponement of death, in the essential ignorance of its date."
Emmanuel Levinas - Totality and Infinity
I am not scared of death. I am not scared of the inevitable event. However, I am terrified of the knowledge of my own death, of having the essential ignorance of its date obliterated and living with that knowledge for the remainder of my life. I'm also terrified of how my death will be revealed to me and that this great revelation will probably appear in the most mundane way possible. It will start with an unremarkable bodily sensation or expulsion or even maybe a feeling that something doesn't feel quite right. A small thing rationalized to hopefully become like many of the other small things that are experienced in life, but isn't. It is the mundane experience of that small thing, which carries with it the portents of doom.
Raymond Carver's death was revealed to him by a nosebleed. For Iain Banks it started with back pain. For my mother a trip to the bathroom. Troubling bathroom breaks, back pain and nosebleeds are common human experiences and ones that do not necessarily signal the extinction of life, but more often than not it is these kind of small bodily events, which pepper our day-to-day existence in an almost boring fashion that eventually do.
It's the mundanity of our continual bodily ailments that substantiate my belief that the default human condition is not health but illness. Our bodies are always already dealing with something. Those moments of complete health (that we think we are in) are probably an illusion, a state of cognitive dissonance, a learned coping mechanism, which helps us get up and do whatever we do with our lives. That little cough you have that just won't go away. Those strange sensations in your stomach. Those sporadic headaches.
So for me, in some respects, I am just waiting for the shoe to drop and it's the dropping of that shoe that terrifies me and not what to do with it once it has fallen. It's the discovery of that small thing. Sometimes I wonder what that small thing will be, especially when those small things happen, like they do, every day. Consciousness of death may be the perpetual postponement that we live with, but not completely, because, for some of us, the ignorance of its date is not witheld. There will be a moment when it becomes something more than just a concept and it is the unremarkable and mundane disclosure of its materiality that terrifies me the most.
