Anesthesia

The closest thing to death I can imagine is the experience of going under in an anesthesia induced sleep.

My senior year of high school I got my wisdom teeth taken out. I don't think it was ever an option to stay awake through the surgery but I imagine that even if it was I would have opted to go under. At the time I couldn't imagine anything worse than being conscious through some horrific ordeal where I felt - however out of it - some aspect of someone cutting into my body to remove something.

I remember the oral surgeon's chair. I remember the giant smock they place over top of me. I vaguely remember a mask, I think it was a mask, and being told to count backwards towards one. I remember thinking that I would have no idea what to do when I got to one. I remember thinking about how I would get there soon.

And then.

I woke up.

But when I say I woke up it's hard to convey the way in which this was different than any other kind of waking up I've ever experienced. I rose out of the deepest kind of darkness. It felt like coming into being. It felt like my brain had to realize what consciousness was as if for the very first time. I cannot say for sure, because of course I don't know, but I imagine this is what it would be like to come back from the dead.

I didn't know before having this experience that sleep is not actually dead to the world. I didn't realize that even when we slip away at night so much of our body's sensors are still whirring and purring and quietly feeding us information. When we sleep some part of us senses the passage of time. Some inner compass gives us a bit of info about the placement of our body. Somewhere deep inside our dreaming brains that sense of "I" still floats around.

But I know all that now and I know it because the one thing that I fully remember about that experience was what it was like to wake up having lost every one of those things. My body had been moved and I was in a new place but I had no sense of having traversed space. I spent a full minute just trying to understand the space around me, so total was my sense of still remaining just where my consciousness had left off. Normally when I think of the shift from dream to awake I sense my mind coming from one kind of place and into another. When I woke up from surgery I came from a kind of darkness that was total. No dreams. No sense of self. Nothing.

Upon waking I "was" again.

But I also now understood what it would be like if I wasn't. 

In that surgery sleep I wasn't dreaming. I wasn't aware anymore. I was no where. It felt like I hadn't been alive.

And ever since then I've assumed that this must be what death is like. It isn't some horrible dark and scary place. It isn't anything. It's just a lack. It's just nothing.

So in one way, there's nothing to be scared of.  Death is not me thinking about a lack of consciousness. There's no me to think. There's no thinking to occur. There's only that lack. There's only that nothing. But since that experience I am far more afraid of dying. Soon after having my wisdom teeth out I developed an intense fear of flying. Stepping onto a plane somehow brought me close to that feeling of nothing. As if the only thing separating me from the nothing was miles of air.

Rationally, I know this is a silly and useless fear. I understand that I am far more likely to die in a car or from heart disease. But when I am forced to sit still and contemplate the space between me and the ground I start to panic. When a possible path towards the nothing is so obvious, when human brazenness is so brash that I realize it has caused me to hurtle through space in a metal box high in the sky, I have a hard time telling those voices to quiet. When the memory of how quickly one can lose everything they know to be themselves has nowhere to go it can claw its way up the edges of the rational self. When the memory finds a home in my mind and my heart and my gut it laughs and reminds me that the nothing can swallow me.

So instead I try to distract myself with books and music. I try to breathe and feel my body living in the seat I occupy. I tell myself that today is not the day I will lose myself.

And I try not to remember the feeling of feeling nothing at all.