How do you want to die?

Yes, I know you don't want to die at all. But you're going to, and so am I, and so has everyone who has ever lived, including Lincoln and Hitler and even Jesus (on the cross --ouch!).

But it's a subject most of us want to ignore and avoid, which is understandable, since it means the end of you and me and our perceptions of the world as we experienced them, for good or bad. Lights out. (What comes next, if anything, is something to explore in another post.)

Okay, so we're all going to die. Cease to exist. I don't know why the system is organized that way, but it is. Any organism that breathes or is otherwise alive only lives for a while and then expires: dies. Arguments aside about whether this is the best way to run a universe of living creatures, this is how it works.

You and I are going to die, and the only way you can choose your method of exit is to commit suicide. A bullet to the head usually does it. Not always, though, as sometimes your aim is off and you end up with brain damage but still alive. A shotgun blast to the head -- ala Hemingway and Kurt Corbain -- is more sure. But think of the mess someone has to clean up. Hard to think about your loved one sympathetically when you had to scrub his/her brains from your carpet.

Most of us don't want to be so dramatic, or so messy. We don't want to leave our loved ones stressed out, traumatized by our private, even selfish, decision to end it all. Sleeping pills or carbon monixide poisoning -- the car in the closed garage -- seems more humane. But even then, we're going to leave someone discovering our dead body and having to call the authorities.

Suicide really should be a last resort, just out of deference to our families.

So let's get back to the purely theoretical. If you had your choice -- which you don't, if you rule out suicide (and you should) -- how do you want to die?

Accident? In a car or on a bike or by having a big rock fall on your head? A long illness that finally renders you an invalid, tubes in your arms, probably sedated beyond recognizing even your immediate family? Old and fading, your heart ticking slower and slower, fading in and out of consciousness? A stroke or heart attack: alive one minute, dead on the floor the next?

Like many other subjects we have no control over, this is just one to think about. Something for cocktail party talk. Well, maybe a pretty sophisticated cocktail party, one involving people who aren't spooked by thinking about their own mortality.

I remember hearing/reading about another cocktail party game: What super-power would you choose if you could pick just one? Invisibility? Flying? Great strength? Etc. Consider this like that: If you could choose -- barrring suicide -- how would you die?

Somebody told me that drowning isn't so bad -- once you get past that panic factor. Can that be true? Can I trust that person? The author Virginia Woolf walked into a river with stones in her pocket to be sure that she drowned. Sylvia Plath, the gifted poet, put her head into an un-lit oven, at 30. Who knows what death was like for either one of them?

When I was at the University of Texas as a grad student, many years ago, the Tower that houses the library was still open, despite the fact that Charles Whitman had hid out up there a few years before and shot many people to death until he was finally targeted and eventually killed by a brave policeman. While I was there, more than one distraught student committed suicide by plunging from the tower. I'll always remember the girl who set her shoes on top of the ledge and the one who, according to witnesses, started screaming halfway down. That's not the way I want to go out: knowing, when it's too late, that I've made the ultimate wrong decision.

The tower has since been shut to visitors.

We all have to die someday, so I think it's worth thinking about how it might happen. Let's hope it's at an advanced age, that we just go to sleep and don't wake up. In fact, there's a Kenny Rogers song, "The Gambler", that says "The best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep." But you and I know that's not the way it happens for most of us.

So, if you had a choice, which you don't if you're not up to killing yourself . . . do you want to go after a long illness, when you've had time to say goodbye to all your loved ones? Or do you want to go suddenly -- a rock on your head, a heart attack, etc. -- without all that prolonged suffering?

Food for thought, but not particularly appetizing food.

Still, when you gotta go, you gotta go, right?