^I admire the way that you sit with death in the same room, cosmic trigger. I have read enough of your posts to understand at least some of what you deal with mentally and physically. It seems to me that you are a very deep lover of life to have survived your childhood with your ability to
feel intact. I can imagine how adding layers of physical suffering and addiction would tip the scales towards escaping the body. I would like to read Terror Management Theory (have read Becker's Denial of Death).
I do not think it is biologically possible for us not to want to survive on some level. I have watched some dying people pass through the struggle of that fear and into a deep peace but the peace at the end is not a given it seems. My grandmother was the only person I know that seemed to truly welcome death and that was because she so literally believed in the concept of heaven. She had been hacked apart by one stroke after another and in her mind death was the glorious door she was crawling towards that led to an end to all her suffering. I was an atheist teen when I witnessed that death and I remember feeling almost a jealousy that my grandmother could so literally think she was going to a place where she would be wholly restored as herself, healthy, emotionally fulfilled and free of any cares at all.
Vic Chestnut had a near death (paralyzing) motorcycle accident and several suicide attempts over many years before he finally ended his life. He wrote a pretty amazing song about realizing that in fact he was not ready. And then one day, he was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4Z-kjr4BLs
A friend of mine just ended her life two weeks ago, an even closer friend, 3 months ago. I am in some kind of limbo in my mind about both of these deaths. Both suffered in life, there is no denying that . In the case of my close friend this was very much rooted in old childhood experiences that would not release him. Death, I'm quite sure was the release they both sought but for me, and all the others they left behind, there is now so much more sadness. The weight of my friend's death is dark shadow that follows me everywhere. Maybe this is why I resonate with what I perceive to be your intimate relationship with death; I talk to death as a presence every day. I pester death with questions, I lash out and berate, I even beg sometimes. Death never answers of course, but sits there fully making its presence felt.