Three heart attacks in 3 years. Didn't make me start asking for help from any being, real or mythical, other than the doctors I'd been paying for, in advance for years. It did make me swear to drive my cars more, if I still could.

I do remember wondering, in the helicopter ride into the big hospital after the second one, how the pilot & paramedic could put up with spending all day in a heap of shaking, vibrating rubbish like it. I expected it to fall out of the sky & kill us all, long before my heart attack could kill me.

I decided that if ever one of my cars ran as badly as that chopper that I burn the thing, before it did kill someone.

Houellie,

"Who did you pray to?"

I prayed to an entity that is completely beyond my reason...the one which follows me around in my psyche - that every time I try to get a fix on, evaporates into a nebulous cloud that I cannot grasp.

It was an exercise in supplication to the unfathomable.

I was helpless.

"It is better to live in the real world no matter how painful than to live in a delusion no matter how comforting."

Did it make you happier or calmer Poirot?

Could it have perhaps been Elvis Presley?

I often think if I was to experience such a thing it would be in the form of the Corral scene in David Lynch's Mullholland Drive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GekiIMh4ZkM

Or maybe like the Dude in The Big Lebowski when he gets knocked out.

I think if anything my self splits and I talk to another me in such situations but the other guy isn't really much help. More a silent observer with his hands up going 'what did you expect' or 'what do you want me to do', or 'you're an idiot'.

There have been quite a few times when I thought I was going to die.

1. Stuck in a ship wreck at 45 metres below and got lost and couldn't find way put with not much oxygen left. There was quite a bit of sediment kicked up so couldn't see a thing.

2. Too many drugs and convinced myself I would die if I fell asleep in my girlfriends attic room that was too black with no windows.

3. Had altitude sickness in the Himalayas and couldn't descend due to the weather.

4. Watching a HBO show on a TV in Guatemala when I hadn't really kept up with the news for weeks, and it was about an asteroid that was going to wipe us out. It was news reporters seriously reporting on the progress, live crosses to different cities, and was quite convincing to me in my hungover state. I finally twigged but didn't want to change the channel to confirm as it was quite fun in the end.

5. In ICU recently with a particularly bad case of pneumonia with a few complications.

Must be just a coincidence... a cancer is mentioned and then up pops Houellebecq!

(And doubles the OLO poster average IQ in the process)

But seriously folks, I mean Foxy...

I'm anticipating that dementia will stop me having to wonder about making such decisions.

Could it simply be that most people agree in many medical matters that 'There is always hope' and some feel compelled to start calling this hope God?

Though I am reminded that Michel de Montaigne wrote "The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death."

Dear Foxy,

>> Would any of you turn to religion if you
felt that you were going to die? <<

Once an atheist friend of mine asked me to console her Chinese friend who was dying of cancer. The friend was a Buddhist. So I explained to her that although I have some ideas about existence that goes beyond the material, they are culturally grounded and different from how a Buddhist would see them. (As I would say today, Christians and Buddhist - more precisely those of them who believe in “spirits” etc - use different models of Ultimate Reality). I suggested she called a Buddhist monk, which she did, and the monk apparently consoled her, did a job that I - or any Christian - would not have been able to do.

So I presume (since I am not an atheist it doesn't apply to me), the answer to your question should be “it depends”. It depends

(a) on what kind of religion is compatible (you were familiar with at least as a critically stubborn outsider) with your cultural milieu (Until recently, for a Western ateist it was either some form of Christianity or Judaism, now many atheists feel closer to Buddhism)

(b) on how “closed” is your atheist mind, how strong a hindrance is it for your heart to open to the possibility of unfathomable HOPE in a limit life situation (as psychologists call the moments when conversions MIGHT occur). Certainly, closeness of death - not imagined but experienced - is one of these situation. For an ex-Chistian atheist, Oscar Wilde might be relevant:

“Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
…
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?” (Oscar Wild, The Ballad of the Reading Gaol).

Poirot,

If I understood you properly, you prayed to the God I believe in. For instance, in Bhagavad Gita, the incarnate god Krishna says , “Whatever god a man worships, it is I who answer the prayers.”

ponde,
the question was about dying, not living