How Doctors Die (2013)
I'm afraid of death. Very afraid. I'm pretty sure we're just meat sacks and when my heart stops beating that'll be the end of all that I am, and that scares the shit out of me. Calling what I feel about death "fear" is almost a category error; it's a five-hundred-foot-tall Godzilla of dread looming just behind me always, and every so often I happen to think about it, I happen to turn and glance at it, and my stomach just drops. The realization that it's all going to end is the ultimate anxiety underlying all others.<p>So when I read something like this, it just seems... so alien. I can't imagine a pain or any feeling, really, worth wishing I was dead over. There can't be anything worse than death. There just can't. Pretty much any amount of bad is preferable to infinite nothing.<p>Maybe the scariest part is that one day, I'm afraid I might change my mind. I'm afraid I might be brought to a point where I think, "Ah, this is it. This is the feeling that's worth dying to escape". The only thing scarier than the worst fear imaginable is the unthinkable idea of a pain so unimaginable that it makes succumbing to that fear seem like a mercy.