What do we mean when we say that something is dying?

It's the future, an illusion, an illumination

All of alive today are one day going to die, and for some weird reason acknowledging this feels a little rude. Death is meant to be somehow banished to the background for as long as possible, since it’s a terrible thing and we can only really confront it when we’re forced to do so at the end of our lives. Maybe, ideally, we never even have to confront it - we’ll just go through our lives normally up until some freak accident destroys us without us even knowing that it’s happening. We are fully alive, fully ignorant of death, until one day we sort of suddenly and painlessly pop like a balloon. 

Death, though, rudely confronts us long before it takes us - in decrepitude, and in the deaths of others. Beloved pets, people older than you, people dealt a bad hand by sickness or accident, all of them will enter a strange state where their old life is over but they haven’t actually died. They’ll be stricken, bed bound, unable to do what they want and unable to get better - this is when we usually say that they are dying, that they have entered some sort of transition process that the rest of us are outside of at least for now. 

Why is that? I think that for those of us alive, to live means to tell a story about ourselves that has an open-ended future. We have things to look forward to, we have long-term projects and goals, we can make big changes. For the dying person, they have no “what’s next”, at least not anything that those of us in this world can comprehend. 

All of us, though, have death in our future. None of us are getting out of life alive! The difference between the person in their deathbed with hours to live and the person holding their hand to comfort them is a difference of degree, not of kind - if two people fall out of a plane, it doesn’t matter if one is 10000 feet from the ground and another is 10 inches from the ground, they’re both still falling towards the earth. 

The point of acknowledging this, for me, is twofold - the first is to deflate any anxieties I might have about achieving immortal significance with my life, and the second is to remind me to savor the first bite of a meal just as much as I might try and savor the last.