Death in the countryside (or on an island).

As I get older I find it easier to come to terms with death by imagining the dissolution of my own consciousness and that of others as a merging with the universe on both the macro and micro level.

If you think of all the millennia in which you and I never existed in thought or physicality, and then through a chance coupling we are brought into being by a confluence of probabilities at the quantum and macro level, and then we are allowed a brief window on existence, which is 'the blink of an eye in cosmic time' as Schopenhaur said, but as quarks and stardust we have existed as part of everything, always and will forever more.

The anxiety over death is always at the personal level. What will happen to MY personality, MY experiences, they will be gone forever won't they? I like Bryan Maghee's view of this: everyone who has ever lived and their individual lives, will always exist in time, they can never be destroyed. You have to think about this one a bit, every experience we have had or will have, will always have a physical existence in time, so in a sense our lives are eternal and we are immortalized in time.

I find the bureaucratic industrialized death of urban society frightening, with its medicalization and hiding of death. My experience with my mother’s cancer revealed to me the true horror of dealing with a terminal illness in western society: not just to have to witness the suffering of someone you love, but to watch that person treated like a piece of meat, a number, a statistic, an object to be processed and passed through the system like a dumb animal.

I've had a few epiphanies on personal death when I've been quite isolated in the countryside on a summers day, or even up a mountain in Byronesque weather: 'I could die here' I thought, and It would be perfectly okay. Just go to sleep and decay back into nature and the wind and sun and rain.

As soon as I perceive the hum of the city again, I can feel my urban death anxiety return, and this is no romantic reaper of nature and human harvests, but the white noise of abstract nothingness and non-being in any form. (Don Dellilo's novel White noise is worth a read on this.)
But then again, maybe population and others remind us more of our fragile identities, whereas with nature I feel a knowing and a taking care of this thing called me, a benevolence. I belong here.

I find nature comforting and I find quantum uncertainties, superstrings and parallel universes comforting and fascinating. The fact that my life and experiences, loves and woe's will always exist like a book in the library of time is the best memorial we can have before we dissolve back to what is our natural state - properly part of everything.
We never know death anyway really, only ever life.

And anyway, we are never truly alive or dead, but exist in a superpositional state of quantum probabilities, I think. I hope. I know.