The Fear of Death

As a young man and as an adult the fear of death wasn't ever important to me. Rather, only the fear of accidentally harming others either psychologically or physically had any real meaning to me. Whether I lived or died as a young man I could really care less. How did I become like that? It think it was my Scottish Grandmother who was unhappy with her husband leaving her and never looking back when she was around 60 who raised me mostly from my birth to about 21 when my parents were off working at my Dad's business and the church my parents ran from the time I was 6 to 12 years of age.

Though I was afraid of death as a 2 year old as I turned blue many times from whooping cough I eventually survived all that even though it changed me a lot and also might have had something to do with getting childhood epilepsy at age 10, even though that was blunt trauma childhood epilepsy which is the only kind you grow out of when your skull grows and the pressure is released thereby. But not being afraid of death often made people afraid of me because I was basically fearless in a lot of ways. It also prevented me from getting into fights at school because I was also very big for my age. So, I would only have to land one good blow and people would be really seriously hurt. So people didn't usually want to fight me that were my age. And I wasn't the kind of person who started fights either. Having had whooping cough made me a very kind and compassionate person. And even though I was also a very fearless person that was mostly about taking physical risks like jumping off of roofs as a hobby and climbing very tall trees by free climbing and going over jumps on my bicycle and riding with no hands or sometimes even standing on the bicycle seat while I rode. So, since I was very strong and co-ordinated and fearless and even though I was by nature after the whooping cough a very kind and good natured person, generally people did not pick fights with me and so I found myself a lot of times breaking up fights especially if one of my smaller friends was getting picked on.

When you are not afraid to die it seems to make other people kind of uneasy because it appears most people actually haven't faced death as many times as I have and lived. So, fear was more present in them and I guess if you meet someone who is just not afraid anymore of death after facing death so many times and accepting the fact that one could die any instant and the fact that it is okay to die because in the end "What are you going to do?" So, I guess my acceptance of death scared a whole lot of people who had not yet come to terms with their mortality so young.  So, maybe to them a piece was missing in me. But from my point of view I had already died many times and by some miracle I was still alive by the Grace of God. To me, every moment is a miracle because I am still alive. I guess most other people didn't or don't experience life this way.