Facing death, and finding life

“No man can live facing death knowing that everything is nothingness”

I was fourteen years old when the reality of my own mortality hit me profoundly for the first time in my life. For many, many months did this realization fill me with startling existential dread. When I woke up in the morning, my first thought of the day reminded myself that one day I am going to die. When my head I rested on my pillow at the end of the day, sleep I could not get to because for hours and hours would I lie awake tossing-and-turning, in-denial over the idea of death being a natural part of life. Only in sleep could I find peace from this dread, but even that took a long time for me to get to. It was the only topic of thought - at school, at home, while watching movies, while being out with friends - that burned in my mind for many, many months, and a point it even got to where I never thought I would be able to shake this morbid thinking from my mind to my dying day.

As children, even when we know what death is, the realization of our own mortality for whatever reason doesn’t seem to hit us at all. The first panic-attack I ever had in my life was when I was fourteen, and it was the closest thing I had ever experienced as to what the associated feelings and sensations in the moment of dying might actually feel like. Taste faltered, touch felt numb, and sight, sound and smell dissipated. I almost fainted. Almost. Luckily I was able to resist the fear-factor to the point where I overcame these symptoms, and my five-senses eventually came back to me a minute or so later. Nevertheless, the scarring this event left on me was profound, and forever did my life change after that because it birthed the on-set of the existentialist thoughts that brought my spirits down for months. Yet it wasn’t so much the idea of death and dying itself that kept me up at nights. It was the “what comes after?” factor which haunted me the most.

From childhood was it instilled in me that when you die, your soul either goes to heaven or hell. It was during this period in my life where I found myself for the first time questioning the vision of the after-life I had for all my life been taught existed. I bought into the nihilistic idea for a while that when you die, that’s it. No soul. No higher-realm. No nothing. Non-existence. Pure black. The very same pitch-black I saw during that panic-attack where my sight dissipated completely. But at the same time, even the idea of eternity terrified me, and I think that actually terrified me more so than the idea of there being nothing. I could not wrap my head around what “eternity” was exactly supposed to look like and feel like if I’m not going by the Christian and religious interpretation of it. I started to think about the idea of eternity having an end of its own, and the idea of there being an after-life after the after-life. I could go on and on as to how far this existential rabbit-hole of morbid thinking took me, but this was the genuine and very unadulterated reality of where my mind at age fourteen went, which is why I can say with full certainty that The Seventh Seal still remains the greatest on-screen depiction I have ever seen of the anxieties pertaining to the existential dread one can face when confronted with the inevitability of death.

That being said, it also is a film which celebrates life. Contrary to what many who haven’t seen the film may think, a good part of The Seventh Seal is quite light-hearted and funny, and this light-heartedness I have always felt is very reflective of the counter-idea the film is trying to propel that devoting an entire lifetime to dwelling on the anxieties of death and the assurances of an afterlife is a silly thing to dedicate time out of our days to doing because an answer to existential questions as these we will never receive during our time on Earth. One can’t truly appreciate life, and its joys, and its comedy, and its absurdities if you let existentialist thinking like the kind I experienced wear you down. Life do you find yourself missing completely.