Once when I was an EMT-B on an ambulance, my speed-freak partner and I got a call. Someone had went into cardiac arrest and was likely DOA. When we got there, the man’s wife was in tears and the firefighters were performing CPR and defibrillation. I took over chest compressions if memory serves, but I could tell right away that the man was gone. Rigor mortis was setting in and, well, when someone is dead they just look and feel different. Their skin turns cold and hard: living flesh turned inanimate, a human being reduced to a thing. The man had apparently been using the toilet, whether it was No. 1 or No. 2 I’m not sure, but my money is on the former. After he’d finished, his heart just stopped working and he hit the linoleum head first. Hard. He’d probably been watching some reality TV with his wife and felt the urge to piss. One minute he was walking around, talking, and then the next his life was over without rhyme or reason. There were no last words, no last cry of pain or fear, just plop! Dead on the bathroom floor.

This event has always stuck with me. There’s something indecent about dying so unexpectedly after something so mundane as taking a piss. It just makes everything seem so meaningless. I wish I would have gotten a better message from that man’s dying. Maybe something along the lines of, “Life is short, and even shorter for some.” After all, he was only in his mid fifties. But I didn’t get that out of it at all. So what is the point of anything when you could just up and die at any given second? Right now, as I type this, a blood vessel could pop somewhere inside my body and I’d be dead as hell. My 28 years on this planet leading up to nothing, just a long sleep that isn’t really sleep. Sure we can all dream of heavens and hells, anything to give us that little bit of comfort we so desperately crave. Everything’s gonna be alright, but it’s not. All of this is, the universe, humanity and all, is just a random, pointless series of events. There is no moral to this story, so enjoy it while you can if you can. If you can’t, well then welcome to the club.