hello, goodbye, goodmorning, and goodafternoon

i want to greet you, before i say goodbye to tonight so that i can say, "have a good day," in the morning.
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an excerpt on life and death

When i was two years old - well i don't remember, but it's what my mother says - my father had begun to die. That was '84. Funny thing is, i know my father battled with cancer for 5 years until he passed away in '92.

Many people are curious about death. I'm not. What is there to learn? Everyone dies, ceases to breathe, ceases to work, ceases to be active. In life, you move; in death, you are moved. There is only one kind of death, at least for us non-religious folk. One second you're breathing, your heart is beating, your eyes are blinking, and your brain is calculating. The next, everything simply stops. As simple as that - everything stops.

Death is simple; dying, however, is a much trickier word to decipher. In a sense, we are all dying; each second alive brings us closer to that moment, that catholic fate, a twisted destiny that God ordained.

And this is where the paradox lies. They are binary opposites, two halves of a dichotomy that has plagued man forever. Living and dying. Dying and living. Literally, each word excludes the other - but in reality, each word must mean the same, for to the same end.

Some have called living a progression and dying a regression. For example, a child is thriving in his habitat. He is hit by a car; at this moment, his life has hit an apex, and at this monumental point, everything that follows feels the pull of gravity and comes crashing down. Spiraling out of control, the kid's life is snuffed away. This would suggest two things. One, dying is then an intermediate of living and death. And two, naturally, the kid is no longer living, because one cannot be living and dying at the same time.

A few problems arise with the first point. Is any decline in health dying? What if one gets better? Of course, the logical answer is that dying is only constituted as such if the end result is death. Fair enough.
The second point is a little harder to deal with. The kid, until the moment of death, is alive. He is breathing. His heart is pounding, his head is working. All the evidence points to his life, albeit with an empty vitality.

So here i am, forced to choose. Either living and dying are the same thing, or there is an impossible paradox.

My father began dying, according to my mom, before his cancer struck him. **********i hope to finish this one day*************** Dying must be redefined as the state of one who has given up hope, who refuses to continue to attempt to improve his life, who is futile. etcetc. finish this tomorrow joe. please.

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end excerpt. not a true story.