How long will you live?

By Brian Coyle

Everyone wants to live forever, or at least most of us do. Who hasn’t dreamed about celebrating their 100th birthday or had thoughts about immortality? But whenever you think about death, that tiny little creature called fear raises its ugly head. Nobody wants to die, not even if we get to pick the time and place. And there is an inherent terror in all of us about what waits for us on the other side. That is, if you believe in the other side. Even if you don’t believe, it could be there, waiting in the abyss for you to arrive. Heaven, Hell, Limbo, or whatever lies in the afterlife, it probably isn’t a “one size fits all” kind of destination.

In any case, believer or not, you don’t have any control over whether anything out there, beyond the grasp of earthly life, exists or not. You’ll just have to wait and see what happens, like everyone else, one at a time; just you and you alone. And unless you plan to end your own life, no one really knows for certain the exact moment of their demise.

So could life expectancy be predetermined by a higher form? One who has already created your own personal tombstone which awaits you? No one in this world will ever know, unless someone or something comes back and tells us. There may be warning signs from those in the world beyond staring us in the face at this very moment. Those ghostly souls might be desperately trying to get our attention because our final breath is approaching, but we are too busy worrying about other things to notice. If we could write a book about our final days and final breaths, I wonder what details it would contain.