The Choice

A short story about Life and Death

Photo by Taylor Leopold on Unsplash

“If you had the choice between life and death, would you accept it?”, he said through his pale, half-closed eyes.

It had been a long shift when he asked me that question and I sincerely just wanted to go home already. Through innumerable days and nights, I held up the strength to sit beside those people and listen to their stories, sorrows, and, yes, nonsensical babbling about clocks and trains and how the ones seemed to accelerate and the others should be caught. I often asked myself why I did this, and I never grew fond of the explanation that “just helping people out of sheer kindness” was what pushed me. I think it was some deep fascination with death itself, not in the dark and cheesy way young goths felt attracted to it, but maybe out of a profound feeling that I needed to prepare for my own in a close and uncensored manner. This night, however, I really just wanted to finally leave.

“Why shouldn’t I have it? What question is that?”, I responded.

“Consider that at any moment you may not be the master of your decision at all, but a bystander of circumstances, at the mercy of the tired wheels of your reason and your emotions so that your seemingly free decision is nothing but the echo of a chain reaction decided long ago. Therefore I ask you: If you were to stop these mechanisms now, and have the choice entirely for yourself, which is probably impossible anyway, would you want it?”

“You mean I could freely decide whether I would live on or die?”

“No, your choice would have to be final. Life would be eternal — perhaps not always as a living being, not always in the same form of existence, but you would know that you exist for all time. Death would be the same extreme, far away from any form of being it is then a state in the wrong sense, namely none.”

He always had a passion for pathos in the cold and ironic sense, which was why I liked spending time with him most days. That day, once again he knew how he could keep me engaged in our conversation while stopping me from leaving him to the lonesome night. I felt challenged.

“I would still choose”, I said readily.

“I am an old, naive man. You see my kind every day and feel invulnerable, almost immortal, at the sight of us, as if you had already made your choice long ago. What makes you feel so sure of that?”

“I hope.” The words gushed out of me within a second, too quickly. He got me there. Unsure what I would say next, I felt confident that it would come from deep inside and that I would have no control over it.

“What for?”

“I hope for progress in my existence. However extensive it may be, I hope there is a substance with which I can fill it, a lifetime, a sentence, a word that gives meaning to my life regardless of its shape.”

“What gives you this hope?” Now his eyes were wide open and his pupils expanded. He sat nearly upright with his fragile elbows taking the weight of his whole upper body and pressing it forcefully into the mattress below. Whatever I was about to say, this was what he asked for.

“The belief in the good itself, the progress, the sense, the madness, the order, the chaos, that it all exists and that every given thing is founded in something.”

“What tempts you to this belief?”

I needed a small pause for this. Not to think, but to feel. What I said next, my mouth and body produced entirely without any help from myself.

“Love. The feeling of being meant, of the intent that exists, that lets me extend myself into infinity without any doubt over my being, so that I can open up to the world and grow from it until I eventually become too big for it.”

He smiled with a gleam of exhaustion and gratitude, as he sank back into his pillow. With a tired voice, he looked into my eyes.

“Thank you. Now I too know how I would have answered my question.”

“How would you have reacted?”

He slowly closed his eyes.

“I would have said, ‘What kind of question is that?’”

And he passed away.