I had one of those shocking epiphanies today. I realized, seriously, completely, viscerally, that I am going to die someday.<\/p>\n
There was no hair-raising event, no near death experience, nothing dramatic. Just a realization that hit me during a very long drive, when I had some time to think about what it meant. Harlan Ellison is partly to blame.<\/p>\n
Obviously I’ve known this intellectually for a long time. And it’s been non-theoretical for a long time (at least since my father died, getting on to a decade and a half ago). I’ve been able to discuss it, and philosophize about it.<\/p>\n
But I don’t think I really believed<\/strong> it until today.<\/p>\n The good news is that this realization hasn’t made me clutch at any religion or counter-rational belief systems. (At least so far–it really only hit home about four hours ago, but I think I’m OK. Heh. I’m still comfortable with my extant philosophy and don’t feel the need to justify any post-life schemes.)<\/p>\n The bad news is that suddenly my wife and child are not just “hostages to fortune<\/a>” in the sense I’ve always thought of it–my happiness depending on nothing terrible happening to them–but also in the closer-to-what-Bacon-meant sense that if I’m not immortal then my death could have serious negative repercussions for them.<\/p>\n I’m not going to get weirdly obsessive about this, but if I suddenly really believe I’m mortal, and I’m an adult, then I’ve got to change a couple of things. It’ll be interesting to see if this realization lasts, or if I rationalize it away after a short time–I am, after all, an expert at that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had one of those shocking epiphanies today. I realized, seriously, completely, viscerally, that I am going to die someday. There was no hair-raising event, no near death experience, nothing dramatic. Just a realization that hit me during a very long drive, when I had some time to think about what it meant. Harlan Ellison is partly to blame. Obviously… Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[461,255,143,238],"class_list":["post-1219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-family","tag-like-a-damn-diary","tag-melancholy","tag-philosophy","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-jF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}