Chapter 2: "Dying" (theme 43)

There are lots of ways to die, and Shawn Spencer has seen his fair share.

There are the quick ways, the car accidents and shootings and stabbings and bombings, the ways where milliseconds measure the difference between life and death.

He always pictures himself going in one of these ways, filled with adrenaline, maybe while bungee-jumping. Most importantly, there can't be enough time to come to peace with death. Peaceful has never been a word used to describe him during his life, so he figures his death will be no different.

There are other quick ways to die, too. Freak accidents, fires, floods, flash floods, tornadoes, hurricanes. You can slip in the shower or have an aneurysm and it'll be lights out almost instantly. Heart attack, stroke, allergic reaction, blood clot. You can think you have the flu and die of meningitis hours later.

If you are lucky you can die in your sleep, which, although not necessarily quick in execution, tends to be quick in that rather unexpected way.

Then there are the slow ways. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes. An alcoholic lovingly abusing a liver to death. Alzheimer's. MS. Even slitting one's wrists takes time, seconds oozing away with the blood. Not that it matters, but even merely existing will, given enough time, ever so slowly kill you.

There are so many ways to die, and Shawn can't help but feel cheated that he only gets one.

This isn't the way he'd have chosen for himself, but, then again, it isn't really his choice.

It's so cliche, though, the gurney hustling down the hall, doctors and nurses shouting numbers and abbreviations over his head. The doors flapping shut behind him, the nurse with the stern-but-kindly face firmly informing his loved ones that they can't follow. It's so cliche that it feels like it's straight out of a movie, or a TV show, and a bad one at that. What is he to expect next? An out-of-body experience? A light in the distance and the unexamined urge to run towards it?

He can almost hear the strains of whatever sappy ballad will be playing over his poignantly-edited death scene.

Even in the midst of his internal pop culture critique, Shawn begins to fade from his mind. He's having a harder time focusing. 'How many hats in the room?' he thinks half-heartedly. He hears a machine, well, several, but the most important one starts to flatline. He's sure this is it. How disappointing. How blase and anticlimactic. The great Shawn Spencer bleeding to death in a hospital while some Coldplay song swells in the background. It's undignified. Unsatisfying. One second he's alive; the next he's not.

Yet Shawn's never been one for commitment. His final thoughts are of re-incarnation and the sound of that machine beeping again.