I Am Going To Die Today

(Written a couple of years ago and found on a hard drive. Not properly proof read yet)

I am going to die today. It was God who told me so. God appeared quite clearly to me and with a calm but affirmative tone said, “Today is when you will die.”

It would be an understatement to say I was upset by this.

What do you do with your final day alive? If you’re me you spend at least two hours trying to convince yourself that this isn’t happening. How could this happen? It can't be true I kept telling myself. However, If you are me you will find that after two hours of this questioning God reappears and just to make sure tells you again to shake away that element of doubt.

So then what do you do with the rest of your final day alive? It’s not easy. I mull it over and over, wasting yet more time. What I find the most morbid part of it is that instead of bursting with life, taking every second and grasping it with two expectant hands I just sat there wondering how it was going to happen. I’m not very good with surprises you see. I would often sneak into the cinema twenty minutes before the end of a film so that I would know how it ended. Then I’d meet my friends to watch it from the start, safe in the knowledge that I was in for no shocks or upsets.

But now I am in a surprise paradox. I know when I’m going to die, that takes much of life’s one truly big surprise away in an instant. However, I still don’t know how. When you actually start to think about it there is an almost unfathomable amount of ways for us all to shuffle of this mortal coil. I if had longer than a day left I would start to list a few of these but time is precious.

I have wasted half the day with all this contemplating. This is rather trivial though as I am certain I have probably wasted more than half my life with unnecessary activities. How bad is a couple more hours to this rather large total of wastage? The first useful thing I decide to do is not tell my friends and family. Telling someone who loves you very much that you have a disease and several months or years to live can let them deal with the situation. Maybe even reach some kind of acceptance of it before you leave them. Telling someone who loves you God appeared before and told you have one day left to live will result in two outcomes. Firstly, they will think you’re nuts and pay little attention. Which means they don’t take you seriously and you have made no real gains or achievements by approaching them. Secondly, they think you are a sick, malicious git and pretty much hate you for the rest of your life. The rest of your very short life.

It came down to this, nature or the pub. Nature has its merits, some of the best memories I have involve the great outdoors. However grand nature is it generally is not that social though. Unlike the pub. A place of limitless conversation. I doubt there are many places in the world where in a single room you can have people laughing and crying, fighting and hugging. I am well aware that most people will think this to be a pretty stupid decision but I have never made many life choices that haven’t at least bordered the realm of the idiotic. It’s one of my gifts.

The two men sat at the bar with me are the most sacred type of friends an adult man can have. I know very little about them. Practically nothing except one is called Alan and used to be Welsh and one is called Ralph and he has his own fruit machine. I see them once, maybe twice a week in the pub. Not because I meet them but because we are all there in the pub. We don’t have each others telephone numbers, don’t know where each other live. Yet we can sit and talk for hours about every subject that time will allow us. The first few drinks take us on the tour of our usual haunts. Why bank notes are nothing more than an IOU, why you should never trust a cat, the type of people who actually believe loan or insurance adverts. These subjects are like old friends leading us on our merry way to drunkenness.

It is a shock when I look to the clock and see that it is 10pm. The beers and whisky do their best to numb the sucker punch that I might only have two hours left to live. Inebriated I let slip my problem to my two bar compadres. They are in no state to take this question very seriously at all. That isn’t to say that they don’t react to it. If anything they take it all a little too philosophically. The first aspect of my circumstance to be questioned is when is it actually the end of the day? Midnight I suggest. This is hastily taken apart. It is the middle of the night, agreed. But not the end of the day. As I am still here it would seem that sundown, the transition from day into night is also not the end of the day either. This would suggest that night is not a separate but just part of the day. Sunrise. It is concluded that sunrise, the start of the next day is the end of the last. I am relieved to be granted several extra hours by these two fine patrons of the bar.

The next quandary proposed by my two chums was this. What is better, living a full and long life unsure of where the next stop will be after the great bell rings 'time gentlemen' and you depart the land of the living or God telling you will die but therefore confirming that the possibility of an afterlife greatly increased? This is a split decision. On one hand the promise of an afterlife is tremendous. On the other hand none of us thought that our particular lives would lead us to the better half of the Christian options. And our lack of any following of the other religions means we’d probably suffer whatever punishment any of the afterlives had to offer us. Basically it was concluded that I seem to have the shitty end of the stick.

Midnight speeds past. We briefly celebrate our understanding of the end of the day. Hurrah, I’m still here. The beer allows me to convince these two behemoths of hypothetical conversation to head back to mine, drinking ‘til dawn and wait for me to die. A macabre but successful suggestion that gets a cheer, some takeout drinks and pack of cigars. Why worry about my health now? It is about 3 am when I start to pass out, powerless against my failing eyes. I am sure my last conscious thoughts are going to be, “I wish I wasn’t this drunk.”

When I wake the next morning the first thing that I am aware of is the intense pain in my head. My joy of not being dead is dulled by slight disappointment that by not dying I am going to have to suffer a really, really bad hangover. The two similarly sick people in my flat are soon woken by the smell of coffee and congratulate me on my survival. Their faces dip back forth from pain to severe pain and we mull over different moments from the previous day. As I try not to start thinking about the huge theological rethinking I was going to have to go through after being lied to by God, Alan says, “I suppose everyone dies today. If you died yesterday, yesterday would have been your last today. And you can’t die tomorrow because tomorrow becomes today when you wake up in it.”

So starts another today then.