The terms "Dying" and "Death"

While there are some terms I lump together with no difference between the two or more (i.e., astral and OBE) in this case, I make an exception.

Here's how I see the difference between the two terms and how I will always use them:

Dying - is a process. It takes time, it often involves pain and extreme fear of losing one's life.

Death - is an event, a single moment. When it happens, everything associated with dying stops. And everything associated with death and the next life begins.

I will state emphatically right now: I am afraid of dying.
And I will state with just as much emphasis: I am not afraid of death.

I have choked on food several times in my life. It's not fun. It's not a beautiful experience. I didn't "separate" from my body to avoid the pain and fear (as some spiritual teachers state happens when people die; I take that to mean when they are about to permanently die, and not survive, and also much later in the dying process.) I felt every second of being unable to breathe, and of trying to get my internal esophageal muscles to work! And I still remember those seconds.

I want to keep living. I'm not ready to leave this life. I still have plenty to do and experience. Dying is not something I'm looking forward to experiencing again.

Sure, some people get it easy. They die in their sleep. They lose their lives without expecting it (heavy object falling from a high space, getting shot in head, breaking neck, brain aneurysm, dying under anesthesia) quickly or without pain because it happens too fast to truly experience.

The rest of us get a longer amount of time to experience dying. This is where the fear comes in. Because we have time to think about it, time for our body to bring forth those fears (and the biochemical process our body creates), and time to experience great pain.

Nobody wants to choke to death, or drown, or go through a heart attack, or be electrocuted, or endure cancer and other debilitating diseases. We tend to skip over all of that because we know that death is easy. Death is beautiful. Death is painless and free of all fears.

I feel that if most people (not necessarily most around here) changed how they thought of dying and death, that more would realize death is what we've all been saying. Dying is the problem and what most truly fear, even if they don't say it that way.

And yes, I know we "shouldn't" have fear. And yet, that lower brain is exceedingly difficult to ignore when in the throes of dying. Honestly, as much as we 'say' we need to be fearless, all of that goes out the window when in such a dire situation. You're not thinking about that. You're really not thinking about much at all (at least for the faster dying events, such as body-damage and problems breathing.) Severe pain tends to blot out thinking, too. We revert to our fearful selves, no matter what.

I've thought that if there was some way to reduce the pain in such situations that we might not fear it as much and be able to accept the situation as it progresses to death. But for many of these ways of dying, it happens faster than any means of chemically, or even mentally, reducing pain. We just have to accept that dying, for the most part, is not a happy process.

Look forward to death all you like. Maybe being as focused on that is what can make the dying part less objectionable ;)