PERSONAL: GENERAL ANESTHESIA IS WHAT IT'S LIKE TO DIE

When I recently went under general anesthesia for surgery, I imagined that perhaps this is what it’s like to die. You’re conscious, then you’re not—99 … 98 … 97 … gone. But instead of coming to with missing time in between conscious states, you just never wake up. There’s no missing time because time has stopped. Is that what death is like?

Where were you before you were born? Come again? This question strikes most of us as nonsensical, because we didn’t exist before we were born. The same problem arises in imagining your death. Try it. What comes to mind? Do you see your body as part of a scene, perchance presented in a casket surrounded by family and friends at your funeral? Or maybe you see yourself in a hospital bed after expiring from an illness, or on the floor of your home following a fatal heart attack? None of these scenarios—or any others your imagination might conjure— are possible, because in all cases, in order to observe or imagine a scene you must be alive and conscious. If you are dead you are neither. You can no more visualize yourself after you die than you can picture yourself before you were born.