Throwback Thursday
Meditations on Death
Part of my personal belief system is the certainty that the time of each of our deaths was written when we were born; and can not be changed.
Where you die, whom you die with, those can all be changed to a greater or lesser degree.
How you die and what you die for ... ah.
This I learned from my father long before Herger the Joyous lectured about death and fear on the silver screen.
Understand that when it is time for you to die, you are going to die. Whether you believe -- as I do -- that your time was written, or you believe that we are only allotted a certain number of breaths or heartbeats, or you believe that the gods blink, and the lights go out ... you are going to die sometime.
You cannot change this.
You can, however, change how you die, or what you die for. You can change what your death is for.
When your time to die comes up, and there's some critter standing there with a box-cutter, or a hammer, or an AR-15 -- understand that if it is your time, you are going to die shot in the back, or you are going to die getting trampled by panicked fellow citizens, or you are going to die from a stress-induced heart-attack ... but it is your time, and you are going to die.
It is far, far better to die screaming your defiance and beating a critter's head in, than to die cowering in a dark closet, with the smell of piddle and vomit filling your nostrils.
This is true for men; it is true for women, for high-school students --
-- and it is doubly true for those who swore an oath to protect their fellow citizens.
If you so fear death that you are unable to change how you meet death -- you need to re-evaluate your life.
And if you are a peace officer, and you aren't prepared to die well ... not only should you re-evaluate your life, but you need to turn in your badge and seek employment doing something else.
When violence comes, and brings your death with it -- die well, for that is the only thing you can change about your death.
Edit:
When I first published this on the old blog, people misunderstood what I was trying to say — that asked that if I believed that my time of death was already written then why go to the hospital? Why rush into a school to try to save people whose time of death was already written?
Yes, I believe that Someone wrote your time of death when you were born — but the time you die has no bearing on your condition when you die. You can spend decades as a cripple before you die — and that is what you should fight to prevent. You can spend scores of years existing with radically-decreased cardiac output before you die.
People can live in a vegetative state for … how long before the Ferryman arrives at his appointed time?
I go into harm’s way not to save the children whose time is done, but to prevent as many as I can from living with the debilitating injuries that violence produces.
I call the ambulance because if it is not that person’s time, then medical personnel will reduce or eliminate the damage that person will have to live with if they don’t get treatment.
When I go to the doctor, I go to keep my future Quality of Life as good as medically-possible. I fully believe that if She has arrived for our business those medical personnel will try their best, but they can’t stop Her. No one can. Or should.
But if it’s not my time, the doctor can keep my heart working at 90% instead of 15%; can keep my toes attached, and my legs unamputated; can keep my Quality of Life high.
Does that make sense?
Ian
I spent 17 years on the street in EMS doing my damnedest to see that people who died - and accepting that they were going to no matter what I did, sometimes - did so in the best condition I could make them, and that nobody did so because they didn't get the help they needed.
Well said, LawDog. A real man dies on his feet, like the Italian hostage in Iraq over 20 years ago, who refused to kneel while his captors cut his throat. 🫡
Anyway, almost ten years after that event, I was teaching elementary school in Korea, where we would have frequent active shooter exercises. We would cover the hallway wonders, hunker down away from the windows and doorway, and wait for the base security to walk down the hallway, testing to see if the classroom doors were unlocked.
I had one student ask me what I thought would happen if it was real. I told those 5th graders the cold, hard truth. I would probably die because I was old and slow, but if I could get close to the "bad guy," I might be able to save other peoples' lives. I explained what "in loco parentis" meant to me, protecting the lives and health of my students before returning them safely to their parents' care. A lot of sober faces greeted my speech. And I didn't get any complaints from the students' parents.
On another base at another school, we had an active shooter exercise, but this time with blanks and a video camera mounted on the shooter's glasses. Fortunately, the students weren't on campus. The active shooter entered my classroom about seven paces from me, and my initial instinct was the exact opposite of the garbage advice base security had given us: 1. Hide. 2. Run. 3. Fight. In that order.
So, I turned toward the shooter, took two paces, then their trash mental programming kicked in. I jogged out the classroom door into the perfect funnel between two long blocks of cinder block classrooms while the active shooter emptied most of a magazine of blanks. I kept running until told to stop by a young base security officer, thinking what a waste. We never did see that video, which I suspect was due to several factors, one of which was I didn't initially run like a chicken with its head cut off.
TL; DR: Beware of fools giving useless advice. If someone comes at you with intent to kill, fight like the 3rd monkey on the ramp into Noah's Ark. Because you aren't just fighting for yourself. A "bad guy" will harm anyone and anything that catches his attention. Better to die than live with the knowledge that someone died because I wouldn't act.