some authors on death

I think about death probably more than the average person. That sentence was rewritten four times with 0% success at making it sound less weird. But it is something that can be helpful to think about, sometimes, not in a 'jesus christ I can't write this music paper I wish I were DEAD' way, but more in a 'let's make sure we're keeping priorities straight' way.

Vladimir Nabokov, on death (in particular suicide by falling):

The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off -- farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you sttretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.

Once we've taken a moment to appreciate how Vlad can make literally any scene be the most beautiful thing in the world, let's evaluate the perspective here. The narrator is a Christian, a bit nuts, but a believer in an afterlife. He balks at suicide because it is a sin, though he does mention that "we who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins." Still, even this man who is a believer in Heaven, or this author who is trying to inhabit such a man, sees the bliss of the last instant as stemming primarily from life's being "death-padded." One can no longer expect anything of life or have anything expected of one, plummeting to earth in those last seconds; therefore is life a new kind of wonderful.
It strikes me as unusual that the viewpoint of a Christian (setting aside his insanity for a moment) would be written in this way.

Ever since I read John Crowley's Little, Big, I've been trying to think of death differently. Or, maybe, death has been slowly changing its shape in my mind. I still find it terrifying, to the point where ocassionally I will have a dream wherein I die and will wake up feeling as though I might actually die, from the fear. But Crowley's death undergoes some kind of severe metamorphosis. Without giving anything away, because it is a wonderful book and you should really go read it, the story revolves around a "Tale" which must be fulfilled by a particular family living in upstate New York. The Tale is never made explicit to them; they know only that they are an inextricable part of it, that everything they do is because it has allowed or forced them to, and that it somehow relates to these tiny gnome people who live in a kind of alternate dimension (I promise it's good, it sounds weird summarized though).

So basically for the whole book there's this kind of unspoken tension, because the family's final generation (about which the story focuses) must somehow make a "journey" to this alternate realm to complete the Tale, and even though no one says it at first it's clearly on everyone's mind that the word "journey" may actually mean "death." Finally, in the last section, Daily Alice Drinkwater (who must depart first) confesses her fear to her sister.

"Sophie," she said softly. "Do you think it's death?"
Sophie had fallen asleep, her head resting against Alice's shoulder. "Hm?" she said.
"Do you think that dying is what it really is?"
"I don't know," Sophie said. She felt Alice trembling beside her. "I don't think so. But I don't know."
"I don't think so either," Alice said.
Sophie said nothing.
"If it is, though," Alice said, "it isn't...what I thought."
"You mean dying isn't? Or that place?"
"Either." She pulled the afghan more closely around them. "Smoky told me, once, about this place, in India or China, where ages ago when somebody got the death sentence, they used to give him this drug, like a sleeping drug, only it's a poison, but very slow-acting; and the person falls asleep first, deep asleep, and has these very vivid dreams. He dreams a long time, he forgets he's dreaming even; he dreams for days. He dreams that he's on a journey, or that some such thing has happened to him. And then, somewhere along, the drug is so gentle and he's so fast asleep that he never notices when, he dies. But he doesn't know it. The dream changes, maybe; but he doesn't even know it's a dream, so. He just goes on. He only thinks it's another country."
"That's spooky," Sophie said.
"Smoky said he didn't think it was so, though."
"No," Sophie said. "I bet not."
"He said, if the drug was always supposed to be fatal in the end, how would anybody know what its effect was?"
"Oh."
"I was thinking," Alice said, "that maybe this is like that."

We play this game with Crowley right to the end, this oscillating back and forth between believing the Tale will kill them and the Tale will actually transport them. But it's strange that, even though there's only a short range of possibility there, so much can still be revealed. As events march ever onward towards the final crossing, the distinction between death and adventure fades until it almost seems meaningless, like the story that Daily Alice relates.

There are, the book seems to say, two great adventures to which we are privy in our lives: love and death. Is this why adults stop playing "let's pretend?" The impulse for adventure is with us from our earliest conscious memories -- have adults simply come to understand that there are two truly unfathomable journeys which are not only accessible, but also unavoidable? If so, what is the content of a great adventure? I did not think love counted. But I am in love and I see that there is more to it than I ever could have thought, and what spots were still fuzzy for me Crowley has made great strides in filling in. I may never love my way to a land of gnomes, but is the fact that the gnomes play almost no part in 99% of Little, Big mean that like me, Crowley suspects we have all we need already with us?

Death is terrifying because we do not and cannot know anything about it. Medical experiments on cadavers, theological parsing, philosophical girding: those things are wonderful but they will never cross the breach, unless they have no plans to return. That longing that we all feel, that thing that makes us read and write and paint and just generally love beautiful things because they give us a taste of something greater than ourselves: have I been wrong to be sad because I thought I would never have access to it? Will I get to know beauty when I die?

I don't know exactly where I was going to take this, but I guess it can be summed up just by saying that maybe for the first time I've found a book that has genuinely given me hope, and a lady (woman? girl?) who has begun to validate it. And I'm very pleased about that.