How You Want to Go
Vikings and samurai wouldn’t die of old age. Neither would Amy Winehouse. There’s something about going out young and hard that makes you a story worth telling. Growing old and disappearing is just what happens. There’s no narrative in it.
How you die is what people can’t stop talking about. They might love you or hate you while you’re alive, but the way you go—that’s what lingers. It defines you. If you die doing something embarrassing, they’ll whisper about it for years. Slipping on your toothbrush. Bleeding out on a surgeon’s table. Catching some disease the news turned into a panic. These are deaths people don’t know how to talk about. They’re just sad and stupid.
The heroic ones are different. Some guy pulls thirty orphans out of a burning hot air balloon and then flies it into a hidden military base. That’s the death people tell. Or you die grinning in the middle of something completely depraved and sexual with people who actually mattered. That becomes a legend.
Most of it’s just context. A junkie overdosing in a train station bathroom is awful. A famous musician dying the same way is tragic and fascinating. Some old guy collapsing on a Wednesday afternoon in a nursing home is pathetic. That same guy peacefully falling asleep at his favorite lake—that’s almost enviable, even though it’s basically the same thing.
But most of us don’t get to choose. A car crash. A heart attack in the grocery store. Some diagnosis that slowly eats you down. Nothing cinematic. Nothing anyone’s going to retell as a story. Which means how you die might not matter at all. What mattered—what’s been mattering the whole time—is whether you had enough moments worth living for. Enough times when you felt like you were actually here instead of just waiting for it to be over.
The question you can’t escape is how you want to go. As if it matters. As if the ending gets to define everything before it. Maybe the only thing that counts is whether there were enough good moments to make dying seem less like the whole point. And you won’t know until it happens.
How do you want to die?