How would you want it to end? When your life comes to a close, or when you chose it to come to a close, what do you want to become of you?

In the majority of cases, people die because their bodies break down due to the never-ending process of life. You fully begin your decline to death when you’re seven. In the interest of this article, I will not address simply dying a natural death due to its sublime nature. I will however discuss the choice to ends ones life.

Last Thursday, according to The Daily Collegian, a student decided to end his life somewhere around 3:30 a.m. on the morning of Friday, April 4. According to The Collegian, that student decided to end his life by jumping from the 17h floor of John Quincy Adams tower. Undoubtedly this is a tragedy.

Again, this student’s death is a tragedy. However, in the general worldview of things, what this student did is highly interesting. Most people go quietly into the night; he did not. The choice to commit suicide is, even though talking about it is held as a taboo, highly interesting. Aside from sex, suicide is arguably the single most interesting thing a person can do with his or her life. When someone partakes in his or her final journey by choice, that person has not only decided that the unknown is better then the known, but they have also left a trail of open ended questions in their wake.

In this line of thought, the suicide note is the single most puzzling and personal arrangement of letters a writer could pen. Did you happen to know that George Eastman, the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company and the inventor of the roll of the film, left a suicide note which read, “To my friends, my work is done. Why wait?” The suicide note is the last public thought of a person at the end. Someone who was written life off and has sealed his fate in blood.

Just a few days ago I was informed that a father of someone I knew in high school committed suicide by playing an individual game of Russian Roulette. I wonder what his suicide note read and where it is he thought he was going to go when the bullet lodged itself in the back of his cranium. Above all the aspects of death, for me the most interesting part of the equation is the unknown part, i.e. the afterlife.

Ninety – 95 percent of the world believes in some major religion. Of the major religions in the world, some hold when you die you will either go to Heaven or Hell; others hold you will by way of your actions while living, be recycled back into the world of the living as either a higher or lesser creature then you were in your previous life.

Only a small percent of the world believes that your death results in the end of conscious thought, i.e. dying means that your life – both mentally and physically – are over. Although I subscribe to the last idea, I have always wondered if all these thoughts were wrong.

What if we are currently living in the afterlife? This is to assume two things: One, there is an afterlife and two, when we die our minds shut off for a small amount of time which allows the mind and the body to completely forget about our previously lived worldly life. Assuming that there is an afterlife, it is completely possible that the mind, before it makes its transition from this life to the next, shuts down and erases all memory of our previous life. Regardless of what every preacher has ever told you, we could enter the afterlife by being birthed as an infant withholding no information of the life we have just previously departed.

We young people look at the world as if we are invincible. As you get older and your body continues the process of breaking down, the mind begins to see the world on a time scale; one which you nor I can escape. Someone once told me that life is more beautiful because we are doomed. I think this is a smart thought.

So I ask you this question: If you knew you were going to live forever, either by way of being immortal or by way of continuing life in some form of an Afterlife, would you really hold the life you have now, the one thing you know to be true, in the highest regard? If you knew you were going to live for all time, would life be as lovely?

The answer to this must be no.

I do want to die one day – not now – maybe when I turn 95. When I turn said age, just to make it interesting, I am going to jump off the Empire State Building and try to land on someone. When they find my note it will read: “To Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes: Whomever I land on, their family should get the money.”

Cherish what you have or depart. It’s your choice.

Brad Leibowitz writes on Thursdays. He can be reached at [email protected]