Imagine you are hiding from a predator, maybe a wild animal or a robber or someone looking to inflict you harm. Or as in a war, you hide to escape capture. No sound, no movement, holding your breath, like we see in movies. But you are not found and the threat disappears. You are safe and relieved, get out of your predicament and now you can breathe, walk, run, and feel free. Only adrenaline, but that’s fine.

Next, imagine you are locked in a little box or cage, big enough just to hold you, with little wriggle room. It maybe dark or you may see light through the cage. You can breathe and yell what you want, but you are constrained with little space for movement. You can’t free yourself and no one can hear you to save you. You are boxed in for eternity. That’s torture.

Death and Near-death

We all may die in many ways. The best is in your sleep. You go to bed and you don’t wake up anymore, for whatever reason, either sickness, suicide or simply old age. Clean and little agony. Another is by accident, or heart attack, with immediate death. Of course if it is suicide or sickness there is sometimes the prolonged suffering before one succumbs, or if an accident does not kill you immediately. Or the wrenching thoughts before a suicide.

Near-death is something else. This is when you are still breathing, medically “alive” but physically dead. Maybe you can still see or hear but you cannot move. Maybe you are in a vegetative state, or pseudocoma. You look pathetic but seriously no one can fathom how you feel. Everyone pays you attention and hopes you recover. But what if you don’t, and what if you don’t wish to recover? Even when you are motionless, and only your eyes move, is your brain still alive? If you are all paralysed, and speechless, who can know how you feel? It is like being trapped in the small box or cage, brain, maybe eyes, still functioning but physically immobile. You want to communicate but cannot, you don’t want to continue but cannot. And that is my greatest fear, as good as dead but yet not dead.

Yourself and Those Looking at You

When you are in that “caged” state, knowing but yet unknowing to others, you must wish you are dead. But those looking after you believe otherwise – they cling to the hope you will survive, get up one day and be well again. It can be a few days that drag into months and years. It is a burden to all those still living but they must look affectionate and compassionate in others’ eyes, so they must try their best to preserve your life. But what about you suffering underneath that useless physical body? People who want to keep you alive for their own conscience may never realise and understand the torture the near-dead is bearing. Maybe they should try caging themselves up in a little box for a few hours.

Nocureman:

I don’t know – perhaps some have been in the cage and truly survived. Some believe you are with God after death, so why subject someone to such caged torture and delay his entry into Heaven to be with the almighty? No one has died (in a cage) and returned to tell us what should have been done. But as living ones now, we should all know how it feels to be in a caged hell. For me, if it happens to me, let me go.