Love, Life, Death and Fear

Have we become so jaded that nothing can scare us? Monsters, slashers, in the closets, under the bed or lurking outside the window tend to make us yawn late at night. The latest horror films are boring unless they have a decent plot. The last forty years have been saturated with media that falls far below the line of mediocrity when it comes to scaring people. We even see documentaries of horrific murders and not a flinch. We fear evil yet that very fear entertains us.

The video game industry increases violence to sell the next line of games....yet...they are running out of ways to creatively kill their animated people and young customers tend to get bored quickly. What is the danger of becoming numb to fear? What is the result of becoming numb to pain of others?

Let me introduce a fear that no one can escape. No...it isn't death. It is the few seconds before death. The fear of not recognizing or even worse...ignoring the sign that we are about to die. Like death....only the dead could tell us what enters their mind at the time just before life burns out. Death slithers into our path like a poisonous snake in the high grass. We fear the snake's bite. After being bitten...we fear the poison...only then do we fear death.

I once talked with an elderly man who was one of the kindest souls I've ever had the pleasure to meet. He told me that he had fallen from a three story building when he was forty five years old. He saw his whole life flash in his mind before he hit the ground. He saw forty five years in a snap of the finger's time. He didn't see just snippets of life....he saw every second of every day of every month of every year.

He said that the fear of realizing he was falling turned his brain to rewind and fast forward at the same time. How could forty five years be compressed into less than one second? It makes one wonder if time really even exists? The fear of death seems to trigger the tiny spark that encases our entire life. My brother who was a professional soldier experienced the same type of spark twice....once in Vietnam and once in a car crash.

The spark has never been measured. Is it at or even beyond the speed of light? Is our soul downloading our memory banks into a spiritual flash drive suitcase before it leaves the body? The sweet old gentleman saw every person...every movie...every event and read every book again within that tiny spark. Do we really fear death or is fear simply a birthing pain of our souls into the next life? Why doesn't fear hurt our flesh like pain? Is fear.. pain of the soul?

I am thinking....at my point of death...will I see my wedding.....my child being born....family gatherings....read every story and poem again that I've read here on ABCtales...all the books and magazines?" Will I write every song and story I've written? Will I see every good deed and every sin in that one tiny spark?

Maybe the spiritual fear is so much greater than the mental fear that we don't have the capacity to even feel it. Could it be that just before death...the mental fear has to maximize before the spiritual fear kicks in? We all fear losing someone we dearly love. It is a fear that matches..or at least comes very close to the fear of our own death. That very fear is what makes love the ultimate power....within good or evil.

Perhaps writers try to tap into many kinds of mental fear with monsters and slashers because death is almost always connected. Are we as human beings...beginning to lose that mental fear? With losing that mental fear...will love also be diminished? Maybe it isn't fear of death at all but the fear of re-living the worst parts of our lives...even for a split second.
Could it be....as death steps closer...the soul with memories in hand....looks to the light of the throat or nostrils...escaping the creeping...cold darkness?

Could that little spark be the act of the soul collecting a hard copy of our lives....extracted from the brain cells all at once? Does the spirit only rapture the good of us as death eats the evil left behind. Does the soul use both good and evil memories to prepare for the next life? Will fear remain an emotion? Without death....can fear even exist? Without fear...can love retain it's ultimate power?

If our lives can be held in a tiny spark
Maybe the vast universe
Is just a walk in the park