On Death.

If there is one thing that I can say truly scares me then it is death. When I think about death, I get this feeling of restlessness, a feeling that death is too cruel. Unfortunately for me, I am not a theist. I’m an agnostic and the concept of God and unity with the supreme or of paradise and hell mean nothing to me. To me, God is just something that people believe in because without this faith, existence would be pretty meaningless, and I daresay, extremely scary as well. To know that death is the finality, that there is nothing after death...not for a year, a decade, a millennium, but for ever and ever is something that is hard to accept. The universe may keep expanding or it may collapse back into a singularity...that there may be other big bangs as well but these 70-80 years (with luck) will be all that I get is such a frightening thought that the only way to keep this fear under control is to have faith in a supreme power.
As a kid, I remember watching one particular episode of the Ramayana is which Ravana dies, struggling to keep himself alive till his last breath, and I thought that all I needed to do to remain alive was to keep breathing and I thought that remaining alive is not so difficult at all. Then why did people die? I asked my mom this and she said that everyone must die: that life and death are two sides of the same coin. I wasn’t entirely satisfied or convinced by this answer and how could I be. At 5, each kid has this instinctive feeling of immortality, and as I breathed and felt my body humming healthily, I decided that it was a bad idea to die and I would not do it.