You’re going to die. It’s true. You can’t avoid it. Every day it creeps closer to you. Your body and life are on a clock, with a finite amount of time. Think of it as a timer, a really long timer. Every breath you take, every step you take, brings you closer to death. Whether you smoke, drink, do drugs; these don’t reduce your time on earth. From the time you are born, your life is already planned out. From beginning to end, that clock is set for exactly the amount of time you will be alive. Whether you take your life at 17, or live to be 80, the clock never added time, or took any away. 

Death is truly an untimely end to life. 98.4% of the time, it isn’t planned. You don’t know it’s coming, sometimes you can’t prepare. I could get hit by a car tomorrow, and I didn’t know it was going happen. But if you don’t die instantly based on the circumstances, what will you think while you lie there dying? Will you think of all the things you never did? All the things you never said? The people you never met? The will you never wrote?

Sometimes, life feels like death. Some people have those thoughts all the time. The regrets are always present. The questions always loom over your head. If I was lying in the hospital a month from now, and I was slowly dying, I would be asking all those questions. Wondering to myself what my life could’ve held if I was to remain alive. What would I do with that fresh sense of mortality? What would I do with my gift? If that happened to you, what would you do with your gift?

When someone says “my life flashed before my eyes,” it’s usually a joke. But if you’ve ever actually had that happen, it can be terrifying. When your life flashes before your eyes as you die, or almost die, you see incomplete tasks, unasked questions, unsaid things. You wish you could go back and tell yourself “JUST DO IT!” This is where the true pain of asking yourself those questions comes in. It doesn’t take a near-death experience to prompt the guilt of unmade decisions, or the ones you did make. 

When you’re dying, what will you think? Will you be happy with how you’re leaving things, or will you be filled with regret? Will you remember that last kiss? Or will you remember that last fight? All the friends you made? Or all the people you can’t apologize to? When your clock hits zero, what will you have to show for yourself? Will you be filled with anger because you have unfinished business? To die angry is to die the most painful death imaginable.