My apologies Dottore. And to the rest of you. I will cease to post on this thread.

Well seeing as how you were banned from PARF for a time...... the mods should decide IMO.

Am I the only one not ever banned who feels this way?

im not scarred of death. what worries me is the process. lifelong smoker..i know how things are likely going to turn out. painful and tortuous.

i tend to worry and fear very specific modes of dealth, like....airplane falls out of sky, a shark eats me, i wipe out on motorcycle, i gasp for breath with cancer, i have a heart attack while mowing the lawn...

actually being dead doesnt concern me. i suspect the experience will be much like a dreamless sleep, and i have already had such an eventful life that i could go tomorrow and be satisfied that i did more than most people ever will

lately, i have begun worrying about dying alone. i have no interest in getting married and no longer care to be in a long term relationship. so, there is the possibility that i will die someday sitting in front of the television like charlie parker, except i will be alone and not found for weeks...... for some reason, this disturbs me alot. and im only 39 so perhaps i should seek help :-)

I have inside information of the four football players killed last month, the youngest of the four -15- his last words were to "tell my mom and dad that i love them and that it didn't hurt" from a young man thrown from a car against a guardrail, back shattered. The only thing we owe in life is a death.

Krap, I don't wanna' die. This place ain't all that bad!:(

Hey guys,
I am pleased that we have kept this out of PARF. Can we make some effort to keep it that way? As a young guy I have something to learn from the rest of you but I am not going to venture to PARF to learn ;-)

regarding......"fear of death really is just the result of being too attached to things in life—and that if you weren’t at all attached to these things, death might indeed not be very frightening"

i think there is some some truth in this. 25 months ago i lost my job. i was forced to sell off my belongings just to survive...thanks RPKESQ for buying my watch which helped me pay my health insurance for 3 months! ( i had a different screen name then).

I had to sell my house and my beloved motorcycles, many guitars, my car on and on and on. in those 25 months, i have been basically, homeless. most of my things are long gone and those that remain, have been in boxes, unseen and forgotten.

as i look back at my well employed and well paid life and compare it to my simple life now, living out of a back pack, i realize that none of it mattered much.

at the time i had to let go of my "things", i felt the tremendous fear and sadness of having to say goodbye to things i had become attached to.

without those things, i feel more at peace with myself and have a new sense of strength because i know that i do not need those things and, that they do not define my life or make my life what it is.

my need to be attached to things and even to people, is now much less while my willingness to accept what must come no matter how unpleasant, is now much increased, including death....

what will be interesting to me is to see if i replace all those things i said goodbye to once i get back into the work force at the level i was at before my new simple life....

and yea, i still have my 911. its the one thing of any value that i have left and i truly cant part with it yet, even though i can not afford to put gas in it let alone fix all that is wrong with it.

All in all I think Dottores thread have turned out very well.

Many profound thoughts on life and death

And as a bonus, we even got a warfare history lesson! SmileWavy

I think so as well. SmileWavy

Hey, I remember you. The former attorney with great taste in music right?

It sounds like you have hit a bad patch. But losing everything and learning from that might be the best thing that's ever happened to you. And maybe learning to let go is part of that.

Here's a nice story:

A friend of mine was a truly big-swinging-dick M&A lawyer in Asia. There was hardly a mega-deal done in Asia in the last 20 years in which he wasn't involved. You'd probably even recognize his name.

Well he was wasn't watching his portfolio, and Oct.2008 completely wiped him out. 200 to zero in just a few seconds. His wife then left him for a French banker. The two teenage daughters were pulled out of their expensive European boarding schools and are now in public school in Atlanta. They hate their father for allowing all this to happen, and refuse to speak with him.

The father meanwhile has a massive coronary and a quadruple bypass. To recuperate he books himself into a small guesthouse in the Alto Adige where he once stayed with his wife. The owner is a master carpenter, and one thing leads to another, and my friend becomes his apprentice. He gives notice to his law firm, and doesn't even bother going back to Hong Kong to clean out his flat. He's a quick study and a natural hustler and becomes very good very quickly. He befriends some people in Verona, and in short order receives a large and lucrative contract to restore the ancient woodwork of a major cathedral in that city. Bingo!

I visited him three weeks ago. He's dropped two stone and looks twenty years younger. He lives in a small stone cottage high in the Dolomite Mountains—very close to the tree line—and drives a little Fiat truck. (Aston Martin in Hong Kong!) He has a small two burner stove in his cottage, a collection of books and a small CD player. That's about all. And he has never been happier in his life.

Oh yes, he's courting the woman who delivers the mail. Hasn't quite succeeded yet, but he's definitely getting there.

As the Chinese always say: in every crisis there is opportunity.

I'm not quite there yet buddy, but I'm working on it! ;)

People mainly. But also things and places. And careers and ambitions. And dreams and delusions.

Yes. I hate to get preachy, but you're mad not to give this up pronto. You're young enough.

I've witnessed a couple of horrible deaths from lung cancer. You really don't want to go there. PLEASE.

Good story with a great moral to it, Dottore.

You need to give up anyway you can. My father was older than most of my friends fathers and died when I was in my early 20's. He was a heavy smoker most of his life. He went into hospital when he couldn't breath and was put into a coma. They had a drain in his lungs. The color and the amount of the crap that was coming out of his lungs still haunts me. I wished I had never seen it.

Death sucks. I had lost all my grandparents before I was ten. Most of my aunts and uncles before 16 and my mother when I was 17 and dad when in early 20's, and a bunch of friends by mis-adventure in between. I am 44 now and still miss my parents dearly.

One of my Uncles was killed in Detroit in his Maseratti...I attended his funeral on my 12TH BD..The President and Board of D's from 3M were at his funeral. Uncle was slated for the top at 3M. At the end of his life he was going back into the Lab to experiment. My Aunt told me years later that he came home one day and said, "He had found something very stickey." She thiought it was Super Glue?

A good friend of mine who I met through Spoon collecting went out gave a Golf lesson to his attorney, stopped by his local waterhole for a glass of wine. Went home turned the TV on to the Golf Channel put his feet up on the Coffee Table and died. They found him 3 days later with the TV remote still in his hand..he was 86. Archy flew 10 missions as a B24 pilot over Germany during the war.

The Golf Channel would bore me to death too.

Your close....it is more being in the world and the small things like enjoying that greasy double double Burger with Fries and Shake...driving you P car, watching the tube or going to a movie..things like that.

But at the end especially if you are sick all of that no longer matters and death comes as a relief from having to struggle for another breath of air.

:(:(:(:(:(..Archy loved to play Golf...he played out at Brookside in Pasadena nearly everyday.

Some things to ponder:
-A shocking statistic about the mortality rate in America versus the rest of the world: Its the same: 100%! Everyone dies eventually.
"It's not that I'm afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens" -Woody Allen
"I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandpa and not the like other people in the car when he was driving."
"I want 'What was I thinking?' on my tombstone" - Roseanne Barr
"He who dies with the most toys is still dead."