[Stolen from a friends livejournal, not in completeness. But he has said the things that I've been thinking today much more eloquently then I ever could have. Enjoy. Spacecraft Columbia, my prayers are with you, may you seek the stars that I never will.]
IWhat, a shuttle crashed?"
"Yep."
"Shit."
Drove to Worcester to pick up the past couple of weeks' worth of comics. Listened to NPR. Got sniffly. Thought about the terror of being in a spacecraft breaking up on re-entry. Would you get to realize what was happening, or would it just be a split second of wondering what was happening, and then nothing?
They say that the crew compartment is armored and sturdy enough that it may have broken free from the main craft as the fuel detonated, and flung them free of the explosion. So they may have fallen, crushed and dying from the forces exerted on the compartment, to their deaths. Or they may have been okay and parachuted out. Or they might have been destroyed in the explosion and never known what happened.
I find myself, sometimes, imagining death with great vividness and clarity. A writing project in which I was involved a few years ago meant that I visualized some deaths in a lot of detail, and I had to write about what the dying people were thinking and seeing and feeling as they died. Grasping at slashed throats, watching for a second as bombs exploded and seeing them and realizing what had happened, that kind of things. All written in super-immediate second-person: "You grasped at your throat, trying to hold it closed and keep the blood in..." and so on.
I'm terribly afraid of dying, or of knowing I'm going to die and watching it happen. And of permanent injury, but mostly of, say, looking down and seeing the lower half of my body gone and knowing that nothing could ever save me, and that that's it, I'm done.
How long does a severed head stay conscious before the oxygen in the blood in the brain runs out? Experiments carried out during the French Revolution seem to indicate that you have a few seconds of knowing exactly what has happened to you before consciousness is gone. Imagine that last second of terror and knowing that you're dead and just haven't stopped thinking yet.
Maybe it would be easier if I believed in an afterlife.
So, thinking of those seconds or minutes before the astronauts died, strapped into their chairs and helpless as flame washes through the crew compartment, or battered to pieces inside a tumbling metal box, or...
I try not to think about this kind of thing too much. I'm a little morbid when I let myself be (perhaps you'd noticed), and it'll keep me awake at night if I let it. Still, as I commented somewhere recently, I project myself heavily into astronauts. It's like stopping to watch fire trucks go by-- it's a piece of childhood I've never grown out of. Astronauts! Space travel! The space shuttle, clunky old thing that it was, was a SPACESHIP! It went into orbit, and it came back! And people flew it! And now they've died. And if I'd done a few things differently, I could be heading there soon enough, and looking at my future and wondering if I'd die in orbit. Instead, I ended up a techie, but not an engineer or a pilot or a scientist, and I just read about space flight and dream about being able to go up there some day.
I'm pretty sure that'll never happen. I'll be here on the ground forever, and then eventually in the ground, or ashes, however I get there. I'll never get to look down on the world from space and see it all, tiny and huge all at once, great and green and blue against the vast starry void. It's all the cliches, but they're cliches for a reason-- they're real, and that's how people have felt about it for so long that it's part of our national subconscious. WE'RE the ones who go into SPACE. WE were on the moon. Even just seeing pictures years later, of people farther away from home than I will ever be, I looked into the mirrored visors and saw myself looking back and waving.
These people who died, even in their deaths, I still envy them for having been where they were. I'd risk that same death and worse for a chance to look down on the sky.