Matt W Cook

Have you ever thought about mortality? That’ll keep you up at night, even if nothing else will. Doesn’t matter much if you’re thinking about your own mortality or someone else’s. Mortality is a sleep-killer.

The death of my father-in-law really brought the truths of mortality home to me. It became something real, not just the general, yeah-i-know-i’m-gonna-die feeling. More of a substantial truth, death-is-coming-for-us-all feeling.

Death is coming. One day, this body-machine of mine is going to stop working and my spirit will be violently ripped from it. It’ll probably hurt, too. And before that more and more of the people I love are going to slip away. One shot is all we got. One roll of the die. One chance at the wheel. One pitch at the plate. Once. It’s not like a video game, where, if you fail, you can always start over or try a different route. There’s no edit-undo button.

Jonathan Edwards tried to think about his own death a lot. I thought that was a bit creepy. I bet that practice kept him up at night a lot. And I bet it made him a lot more careful in how he lived. No screwing around with this game.

Mortality keeps me up at night. I get scared. Scared of dying. Scared of the people I love dying. And, most of all, scared of dying without having done what I ought to have done. Up all night long…

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