I’m sitting on top of seventy thousand bodies, surrounded by graves stretching farther than my eyes can see, one after another. My mind refuses to comprehend it, no matter how hard I try. My heart understands what my mind can’t, there was pain here. I know there was pain here. I can feel it in my bones, the screams, the fear, the hunger my body has never actually known.
And still, my mind can’t understand it.
What does it mean to be lifeless? Do thoughts stay even when the body is gone? Is death forever consciousness without flesh, like your brain is suspended in silence? Or does your soul vanish, disappearing into nothing at all? But still i wonder what does it feel like?
Everyone dies. It is the one certainty that connects every human being together, the only thing we truly all share. But is death the same for all of us? Is it the same for you and I?
Can the dead feel their names being spoken, carried forward by the next generations? and can they feel the moment they are forgotten? Can they feel anything at all?
It’s impossible to imagine the absence of feeling forever. No thought. No movement. No self. Is death nothingness? And can a human being, once they have existed, ever become nothing at all?
And still, my mind can’t understand it.
What does it mean to be lifeless? Do thoughts stay even when the body is gone? Is death forever consciousness without flesh, like your brain is suspended in silence? Or does your soul vanish, disappearing into nothing at all? But still i wonder what does it feel like?
Everyone dies. It is the one certainty that connects every human being together, the only thing we truly all share. But is death the same for all of us? Is it the same for you and I?
Can the dead feel their names being spoken, carried forward by the next generations? and can they feel the moment they are forgotten? Can they feel anything at all?
It’s impossible to imagine the absence of feeling forever. No thought. No movement. No self. Is death nothingness? And can a human being, once they have existed, ever become nothing at all?
By Golda McPherson
