Each death we might meet is tethered to a particular birth, with countless immalleable events strung between.
We often misinterpret the immaleability of the strands of reality as temporal-causal directionality, as the Arrow of Time. The simplicity of the Newtonian billiard-ball model of causality seduces us. Surely with enough register tape we can account for the past and future history of the universe in a grand litany of "if this, then that" statements. And perhaps that tape would tell a cohesive story, albeit one of the practically infinite set of possible stories.
Gazing upon the quantum experience of being from the past or the future reveals this taped litany as a single indelible strand, a chain of events. Yet pausing within the timeless present moment, we can swim among the possibilities, twanging the manifold strands that thread through the eye of the needle of Now. An endless chain of choices lead us to this one. Each of those choices was an explosion contained and channeled along this strand, defined and distinct among the innumerable other strands along which even the slightest variations in intention and manifest action would have channeled us.
Do you see why we cannot afford to condense time into a line? Do you see how the premise of conscious choice, of free will, creates a branching web of nearly endless possibilities? Do you wonder who freely chooses and who mechanically executes their programs? Does the soulless thirst of the Moon blow the very winds, whipping the seas into waves and swells, whisking the skies into cloudy dollops teeming with bolts of fire ready to rain down upon the tinder beds of ancient forest floors?
Could it be that a body thousands of billions of billions times more massive and billions of times more primordial than my meager water balloon stretched over rubber-banded bones —— could that immense and ancient body be also tremendously more aware, more intentional, more intelligent than me? For the Moon weighs in at a supposed 7.346x10^22^ kilograms, and has celebrated some 4.51 billion birthdays. And what of her older sister, the Earth, at 81 times more massive, and 60 million years older? What a fateful taint of ignorant arrogance would I need smeared over my mind's eye to deny the possibility — nay, the probability! — that the ground beneath me meets my feet, that the sky above crafts every breath I take, that the stream babbling down the mountain sings up the sun, and of the season's snow?
We return to death. When the past and future fall away, what have we left? Were the present moment to remain indefinitely paused and timeless, what might we become? Far be it from me, who has only (medically speaking) died once (and for a paltry four or ten minutes), to assume to know anything of the death that you or anyone else might encounter. Free samples, of course, await us in the space between breaths, in the flashbacks and flashforwards ensconced within the exploded instant of a catastrophic accident, in the pits at the bottom of a lover's inky pupils, in the vast void suddenly surrounding as orgasm washes us away.
Lucretius would have us fear death as much as the eons before our birth, while Epicurus before him would have us release both fears as fruitless impediments to happiness while we live. I found myself wondering what it is like to be Thomas Nagel considering the Epicurean perspective on death, which twisted into the strand where this piece unfolds before us.