Questions

There is the life before your death, which belongs to you, and then there is the life after your death, which belongs to others. If you have made yourself heard, then they will gather in the empty moments just after your passing, when your life-before-death is no more and your life-after-death has not yet begun, to fill the space with memory and fabrication. They will construct you out of half-remembered wisps and unconditional generosities that may barely resemble you, but which are justified by a survivor's guilt and fear - and you will have no say over any of it. It is, after all, no longer your life to live. All the more reason to guard it jealously while it is yours.

By rough estimate, 100 billion beings have graced this earth to date. It occurs to you that being alive is not a default state, as it seems to be when surrounded daily by the living, but an exceptional one. Differently: it is an absurdity that we are alive at all. The rich (I think) don't spend all their time agonizing over what it would mean to be poor, so why do all the living agonize above all over death? It's strange, no, that we obsess over something that doesn't fuss those who have it, and will presumably no longer fuss us when we have it too. There has never been such universal insecurity amongst the members of an elite class.

I would not presume to suggest how you should spend your life-before-death, but if I were to say one thing, it would be to wonder about the use of asking what life is while you are still a member of the living, and not yet a member of the once-living. What is life?, says someone who inhales, breathes out the words, fibres them with a heart's beating blood. I hope it is clear that the question is not a true question, if by definition a question must have an answer. Call it instead a bleat of loneliness, which issues from one so vastly wealthy he knows not what to do with his riches, and is ashamed that this is his greatest dilemma. We, in truth, are crushed by our fortune; we are unable to comprehend, much less survive, the world's ceaseless treasures.