How I Die

This sounds morbid, but it really takes me to the dead end.

I have been contemplating for a while whether to get here or not. Now, I think it is necessary.

The grammar looks a bit wrong, but it is not. I don't think that the process of dying is in the future, although death is, for now.

But to die is a process that starts, to my mind, at the age of 40 years - the first indication being the loss of the elasticity of the muscle in the eye and I cannot quite see the subtitles on TV as I suffer from long sightedness - which the experts say is a sign of old age.

It takes a while for me to accept that I have started to die, although conceptually and philosophically it does make one feel heroic thinking and talking about dying.

The Tibetian Book of Living and Dying starts by saying: "To know how to live, one must know how to die."

It is a profound statement and puts life and death as two sides of a coin.

In mathematical economics, one is the prime and the other is the dual - as in: if the prime is profit maximisation, the dual is cost minimisation.

In simple English, it is: To live is to die.

This is all theory. The reality and the practical aspects of life makes things a bit hard.

How does one choose to die? How do I choose to die?

All things considered, the best way is the natural way - which translates into biology means the failure of the most vital organ, the heart.

Heart failure is very different from heart attack. Heart attack is a sudden and unexpected (in terms of timing) contraction of the heart muscle (akin to cramps) which jeopardises the circulation of the blood.

Heart failure is the failure of the heart as a muscle as a result of wear and tear over the years, just like the muscles in the eyes which gives long-sightedness; in this case, the increasing failure of the heart to pump and hence the slowing down of the circulation of the blood. Eventually, the decline of the blood circulation affects the whole body system and it shuts down. This is the natural way to die - and, in ordinary language, it is called "to die of old age."

I know a healthy old man who exercised everyday to keep his heart strong. He had a stroke of the throat, and couldn't eat properly and couldn't exercise. He sat on the wheelchair, and died three years after. Now, I know, it takes three years for a good heart to die. That is the down-side of having a strong heart - it just takes too long for the system to shut down.

The heart attack is a much more self-inflicted way of dying. One can have a heart attack by maintaining a nasty temper at every moment every day, eat plenty of fatty meat, drinks well, don't exercise (such as by having a big nice comfortable car), and be involved with tons of projects all at the same time as a sign of great busy-ness in life and a sign of doing well. Well, to live well is to die well. At the appropriate moment that one chooses, one can just fly into a temper and that's it. End of the line.

Not a bad way to go considering the alternatives. Internal organ failure is quite a nasty way to go - the liver, the kidneys, the pancreas, the prostate, the breast, the cervix. These are problematic because of the heart. If the heart fails first, nothing else matters.

Physical handicaps are tough because one has to contend with the disdain of others in society which as a result can really make an otherwise ordinary life quite uncomfortable by disqualifying the handicaps from the mainstream of society. One just can't get into the game, and therefore cannot participate in whatever everybody considers to be the good life.

Unless one is born with the physical handicap, one can become one by doing gangs that think that the way to live is to dismember each other's limbs as a normal form of everyday activity. Sometimes, they over-estimate their ability to maim and as a result kill which then gets them into trouble with the law which gives them life imprisonment which is really a slow death sentence with a full stop.

The conventional wisdom is that we die by the heart as a result of sedentary way of life and eating "good" food, by having a good degree and getting a good job that puts us in a nice air-conditioned room to sit down for eight good hours a day, except the weekend when we sit in the un-air conditioned room in our own house watching TV. Education therefore gives us an early death of younger than 80 (if 40 is the peak of bodily deterioration).

So those who are considered "poor" and "toil the land in the hot sun" gets to exercise as part of living, eat minimal, and stay slim and tough and hopefully not unhappy - unless badly advised by ambitious politicians whose only strategy to get votes and stay in power and become rich and taking from others is to convince these poor people who are doing well one their own that the grass is greener on the other side when in fact the other side is dying from obesity and internal organ failure of all sorts.

Well, of course, everybody dies and it is just a question of the style of leaving. We think we have a choice, but in the end it is Hobson's choice.

In the end, the only way to die is to die happy - by embracing whatever comes, and smile when the time for us to exit is here.

For those who are into this philosophy and thinking and the only moment is now, it means that now is the moment of life and now is only the moment of death. It's a fifty-fifty chance or, I prefer, a zero or one probability.

There is really much that we can think or do about death. Having realised it, to live. That's all. Death is a default, a fallback.