My Comment: Why do I loathe thinking about this subject? I think I loathe it
because when parents give life to a child they usually do not belabor
the fact that they have bestowed death on him/her as well. It's simply a
fact we all die and in youth parents usually did not tell us that until
we are much older so we are not horrified. Some couch the sting in
religious myth. Sure Mrs. Calment, a subject of the reporting, can defy the odds by living to
122. So what? She died anyway and most will not live to that age.
Death is, I believe, nature's way of preserving life on the planet which
could not sustain any species living forever. The myth is Ponce de
Leon looked ever so hard for the Fountain of Youth and we have been
looking ever since.
The conundrum I face is this: I love to experience consciousness, I love learning, I fear
suffering and the natural decomposition of the body. Since I do not
know what death is I fear jumping into it and yet nature says not only
that I will but I must. My mother never told me that or, perhaps, I
would never have emerged from the womb.
Hobbs said life is nasty, brutish and short so why did my parents or
does any parent bring a person into this world to face the natural often
massive suffering of old age to its natural end while watching whatever
hard-worked-for fortune we have left disintegrate into dust (especially in a Trumpian world) a metaphor
for life.
Our bodies impossible to recognize at even 90, or 80 are a shadow of the
beauty we were at 21. It is reality but I don't have to like it and I
don't.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/science/human-age-limit.html?em_pos=medium&emc=edit_sc_20180702&nl=science-times&nl_art=1&nlid=75028030emc%3Dedit_sc_20180702&ref=headline&te=1
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