Dying as an event doesn’t concern me in the slightest. I already know what that’s like, and what it’s like to return from the void. It’s a welcome and inevitable stage of the forever loop within which I find myself all over again.

I know what is involved with having my Self, the things that make me Me, disappear and have to be rebuilt, of waking up connected to those machines and having no memory. No concept of time. No sense of the Self. No concept of place, presence, preference, or purpose. There were no signals that my brain was going to return, not until my hands frantically tore the hoses from my neck stoma, one hose for sustenance, one tube for oxygen. After that episode my wrists were secured to the hospital bed. So then it was only the mechanistic rise and fall of the respirator, the rushing slushing thump thump of someone’s slow steady pulse tormenting my slowly returning sensory functions.

The first memory I have of walking was of a cellular conflagration. I tried one foot on the ICU floor, clad in warm anti-slip hospital socks, which surely ignited with the searing blue-white flames of a neutron star - or so it felt from every cell contacting the floor who’s signalling lit up the long dormant nervous system bundles traveling upwards through limbs to spine to brain stem and into the hypothalamus. Every sensation was this way for days, weeks, as the mind restructured neural pathways to make sense of its connection to reality. I hated every second of this, I wanted none of this. I just wanted the void, the nothingness.

So then, over the years I’ve lost everything and rebuilt it all over again several times. I lost count of the number of times I’ve woken up from anesthesia, fallen asleep in an MRI machine, felt the caustic burn of radioactive tracer fluid flow from the IV into the furthest reaches of every vein before undergoing one CT scan or another.

I’ve had a 15cm long vacuum-primed needle inserted into my abdomen to remove two liters of clotting blood from internal bleeding. Years prior, without anesthesia, I laid still face down as a cannula needle was inserted through the C5/C6 cervical joint to enervate one nerve inside the spinal column… I was calm, perfectly still, daydreaming of picking wildflowers.

Death in itself is trivial, expected. However, during this most recent cycle I’ve come to an awareness that is challenging to explain, one which surely some religious scripts have attempted and failed and are vastly irrelevant, an awareness which could be described not with words and certainly not with the usual language, so I won’t try to do so here, but something has changed with the tumour growth over these past few years.

What I want is to keep building new memories, not to keep recovering, not to keep rebuilding, but to move forward as I once did. I want to watch the sunrise not from a hospital window, but from the desolate reaches of vast deserts, from a mixed snow and ice ridge with summit cornices looming above, to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays permeating every cell from the surface of the ocean as I dive far below - exploring the reefs once more, but most of all to be capable of living every day without being So Damn Tired.