“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
– Haruki Murakami (1949-present), a Japanese novelist and translator, widely regarded as one of the most influential contemporary writers of fiction.
I SAW my mother’s uncle lying on the floor, his body covered up to his neck, quiet and unmoving.
He was dead, though it did not seem so.
Only a few days earlier, he had spoken to me as if nothing were about to change.
That memory sat oddly beside the stillness before me, as though the two did not quite belong together.
I was only a primary school boy then, living in our remote village in Serian District about 40 miles from Kuching in the early 1960s, with little sense of what death truly meant.
Yet that moment stayed.
It settled somewhere deep, not loud or dramatic, but steady and persistent.
Decades have passed since that day, but the thought has never quite left me. It returns now and again, quietly circling, as if it has made a home in my mind.
And whenever it does, it brings with it a simple, stubborn truth: I do not want to die. It doesn’t arrive dramatically.
There’s no thunder behind it, no trembling hands, no racing heart.
It comes quietly, like a thought that has learned patience.
It waits until everything else settles – the noise, the distractions, the small obligations – and then it steps forward, uninvited but not unwelcome.
I don’t want to die, I thought again.
And every time I say it, even just in my head, I feel like I’m supposed to understand what I mean.
But I don’t.
That’s the strange part. It sounds like such a clear and certain statement, almost as if it comes straight from instinct, fear, or even love itself.
People say it as though no explanation is needed, as if everyone should immediately understand what it means.
Yet the meaning never feels quite as obvious as they believe it is.
But when I try to hold it still and examine it, it slips through my fingers.
Why don’t I want to die?
It’s not fear, at least not in the way people usually describe it.
I’m not lying awake at night imagining darkness swallowing me whole.
Visions of endings do not haunt me.
If anything, when I try to imagine death, I can’t get very far.
My mind replaces it with something else – sleep, silence, blankness – but I know those aren’t accurate.
They’re just placeholders.
Death isn’t something I can picture.
So how can I fear it properly?
And it’s not because I love my life so much that I can’t bear to lose it.
My life is … fine.
It’s a series of days that pass one after another, each one carrying its own small weight.
There are things I enjoy, things I tolerate, and things I avoid.
Nothing extraordinary.
Nothing unbearable.
If I’m being honest, there are long stretches when I feel like I’m just moving through it without really holding on to anything.
So, it’s not that. It’s not my job. I could leave it.
It’s not my hobby. I could lose them.
It’s not even the people I care about – not because they don’t matter, but because I know they’re not permanent either.
One way or another, we all drift apart eventually.
Time makes sure of that.
So why?
Why does the sentence still feel true?
I started thinking about death differently at some point.
Not as an enemy, not as something lurking in the shadows waiting to take me by surprise.
That idea felt too dramatic, too personal.
Death doesn’t feel personal. If anything, it feels indifferent.
Like a light in a room.
When the switch works, the room is bright.
I can see everything – the walls, the corners, the small details I usually ignore.
I move around, I interact, I exist within that space.
And then, one day, I flip the switch, and nothing happens.
No flicker. No warning. Just … nothing.
The bulb is gone.
That’s it.
No malice.
No intention.
Just the quiet absence of something that used to be there.
That’s how death feels to me.
And still, I don’t want it.
Which brings me back to the same question, over and over again.
If I don’t fear it and I’m not clinging to what I have, then what exactly am I holding onto?
I think it might be this: I don’t want to stop in the middle.
Not because I’m in the middle of something important.
Not because there’s a goal I’m chasing, or a dream I haven’t fulfilled.
I don’t have a grand narrative that needs to reach its conclusion.
But I am … in something.
There’s a flow to being alive that’s hard to describe until you try to imagine it ending.
Thoughts lead to other thoughts.
Moments follow moments.
Even when nothing significant is happening, there’s still a kind of movement – a quiet continuation.
And death interrupts that.
It doesn’t resolve it.
It doesn’t conclude it.
It just … cuts it off.
Like a sentence that never finishes.
I think about that sometimes.
About reading a book that suddenly stops halfway through a paragraph.
No final chapter.
No last page.
Just an abrupt absence where something should have been.
Would that bother me?
Part of me wants to say no.
Why should it? Not every story needs an ending.
But another part of me resists that idea.
Not because I need closure, but because I’m already inside the story.
I’m already reading it from the inside out.
And being forced out of it without warning, without transition – that feels … wrong. Not tragic.
Not unfair. Just wrong in a way I can’t quite explain.
So maybe that’s it.
Maybe when I say I don’t want to die, what I mean is that I don’t want the interruption.
I don’t want the sudden shift from something to nothing.
As long as I’m alive there is still a distinct experience of being me.
Even right now, as I think this, there’s a texture to it.
A quiet awareness.
A sense of presence that doesn’t need to be meaningful to exist. I can feel time passing – not in seconds, but in thoughts.
One idea gives way to another.
One question leads to the next.
There’s continuity there, even if I don’t understand it.
Death takes that away. Not replaces it nor transforms it. Just ends it.
And I can’t relate to that. I can’t step outside of experience and look at its absence.
The moment I try, I’m still experiencing something. I’m still here.
So, when I say I don’t want to die, maybe I’m really saying: I don’t want to lose the ability to say anything at all.
Because even this – this confusion, this lack of clarity – it’s still something.
It still exists. It still has a kind of presence.
And strangely, that feels worth holding onto.
But then there’s the other side.
Because as much as I don’t want to die, I also don’t want to live forever.
That thought unsettles me in a completely different way.
An endless life doesn’t feel like a gift. It feels like a trap.
Not because life is painful, but because it would never release me.
There would be no boundary, no edge, no point at which things naturally come to rest.
Everything would stretch on indefinitely.
Every experience, no matter how meaningful at first, would eventually lose its shape.
It would blur into everything else.
Without an ending, nothing stands out.
Meaning needs limits.
I don’t know why, but it does.
If I had infinite time, what would matter?
I could always do something later.
I could always fix things later. I could always become someone else later.
And because of that, nothing would ever feel necessary now.
Endlessness would dissolve urgency.
And without urgency, something essential disappears.
So, I don’t want that either. I don’t want to be trapped in a life that never ends.
Which leaves me here, in this strange in-between.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want to live forever.
And I still don’t fully understand why.
But maybe I’m starting to see the outline of it.
It’s not about choosing life over death.
It’s not about rejecting one and embracing the other.
It’s about wanting a life that feels … complete.
Not perfect.
Not meaningful in some grand, universal sense.
Just complete in a way that makes sense from the inside.
A life that unfolds at its own pace.
That doesn’t end too soon but also doesn’t overstay.
A life that has a shape even if I can’t see it yet.
And maybe that’s the closest I’ll get to an answer.
When I say I don’t want to die, I’m not rejecting death itself.
I’m rejecting the idea of ending before something – whatever it is – has had the chance to fully happen.
And when I say I don’t want to live forever, I’m not rejecting life.
I’m rejecting the idea of stretching it so far that it loses its meaning entirely.
So, I stay – here. In the middle of something I don’t fully understand.
Aware enough to notice it.
Confused enough to question it.
And present enough to say, again, without fully knowing why: I don’t want to die.
Not yet.
Not like this.
Not before this – whatever this is – has had the chance to finish being what it is.
Even if I never understand what that means.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at hayhenlin@gmail.com.
