When it's my time.

So - Grey's Anatomy - sort of touching... very schmaltzy... kinda crappy.

But it made me think - I once had that thought that Meredith had... the "give up" thought.

When I die, I want to drown in a lake of ice-temperature water.

We were staying on Lake Eibsee, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany on vacation - I imagine I would have been 19 or 20. Lake Eibsee is an Alpine Lake, fed by... melting snow from the Zugspritze, the highest Alp in Germany. German sites call the lake "Refreshing!" I call it "hypothermia inducing." But lovely nonetheless.

Lake Eibsee also had a floating raft in the middle of it. So, stupid American Boy, I dove into the lake. By the time I realized how cold the lake was, I couldn't turn back and I had to swim to the raft. So swim I did. After trying to re-warm up on the raft, I jumped back in and swam towards the beach (I had jumped off a ledge of the hotel where we were staying, and so I was swimming back a different way than I had swam to the raft to begin with... a farther way, naturally.)

Another stupid mistake. As I swam, I realized how cold I was. And then I couldn't feel my arms and legs. To shore was probably three hundred feet away from the raft... but the water was deep and it was cold, and I grew clumsy and chilly and thought, "Well... dying here wouldn't be so bad. I could just stop swimming and I'd sink under..." And it was so peaceful at that moment... It seemed like the right thing to do; just stop swimming. And sink. It made perfect sense to me, and for a nanosecond, but a nanosecond that really stuck with me, I seriously weighed the option of letting myself sink under the water and drown. I don't have a particular deathwish, but it just seemed like a completely viable option -- after all, in death I would be warmer than I was at that particular moment... and death wasn't a scary black void, but a dark, velvety place where I'd be warm and dry... and it would be so easy, and so painless to get there... but so warm and so fulfilling once I was there. Very... pleasant.

Of course I snapped out of it after about three seconds, and thought that if I let myself drown in the lake my parents would probably never forgive themselves, and I shouldn't ruin their vacation by being selfish and quietly slipping under the water and going to sleep... but it was the nearest to death I've ever been. And while I wasn't at the threshold, I could easily and, at the time, consciously, made a choice to let go...

So when on Grey's they talk to Meredith about her "giving up" I could totally empathize. In another situation, I might have just said, "okay..." and let myself slide under. The cold and the mind-numbing shock of the water made it seem... "okay..." I'm glad I didn't... obviously. I've lived to get my ass handed to me in court years later. But I hope when death comes it's like that. I hope it's "okay..." to just slide over. And I hope it seems like a nice place when it comes for me, because if I passed up my chance to have a soothing, easy death, and I I get stuck with a wracking, scary painful one...

Well... let's just say steer clear of me for a couple days after on the other side, because we all know how much I complain in life so just imagine how unhappy I'll be if I passed up a good death!