Hey, everybody's doing it

If I get sick and die, it'd suck and I imagine that I would resist, but more as a matter of habit and fear than any real metaphysical understanding of what is happening. But it wouldn't be all bad. I'd shuffle off this mortal coil and get to leave behind the dissatisfaction, the stress, the mind spinning like a record, baby round right round now, the fatigue, the projections, the lack of understanding, the rigidity, the pain, the mania, the curses, the horror.

I still can't shake the feeling of how intense it must be to realize that you're dying, the guilt you must feel for leaving, for causing pain, sadness, heartache. The anger at all of the moments missed out on. How horrible it must be to leave loved ones behind, to see on their faces the realization that life's subtle shifts can be quite seismic, the ripple of shockwaves unending.

In living and dying, I sometimes find myself thinking about my maternal grandfather, who grew up in a well-off orthodox Jewish home in Poland before the second war changed the continent.
I wonder about the time he spent dreaming of the many lives he might lead growing up. What did he imagine he would become. Family business? Make his own fortune? Marry a rich Polish countess?
At any point in the twilight of his life, maybe when staring out the window on the bus ride home from work and feeling tired and pensive, did he wonder how the hell life brought him there?
When he was lying on his deathbed in some two-story cutout on Lawton St in the Sunset District in San Francisco, CA in 1978, if for a moment as his life played out before his eyes, did he wonder: How in the hell did I end up here? How did my life take me down this road? Not in a million years when I was a boy cutting class, smoking cigarettes in the janitor's closet. Or when I was in a TB quarant. did I imagine this...
Is that something we all will know?