Are you afraid to die? Well, you should be. 'Cause once you die, it's not heaven or hell. Not even sweet nothingness the non-believers assume.

Here's what will happen.

The first few moments of death are the best. The feeling of losing all your sensation one by one, it's blissful. Perfect. Your entire life flashes before your eyes ultra-condensed in a few seconds. Then there comes total blackness that could have lasted for a few seconds or a few years, I don't know. But when this comes, hold on to this feeling as much as you can because right after this...

"Time of death, 13:06," the nurse announced. I could hear all of those very clearly, the shuffling of the tools, the footsteps, and oddly, the steady long beep of a flat line.

An intern was sobbing at the corner. Apparently, this was the first time someone died during his shift. Except I wasn't dead. I tried to comfort him, along with his colleagues telling him that that was something you have to stomach on a daily basis as a worker in the hospital. But no words came out of my lips. I couldn't move anything. Not even my eyes which were wide open and unblinking and seemingly fixed to a single point at the ceiling.

I realized that I wasn't even breathing. And as if on cue, my chest began hurting. Like I was constantly drowning, gasping for air. But I can't seem to j u s t d i e. Hell, I didn’t even spasm involuntarily. I just lay there still, internally screaming in pain as each of my nerve endings fire back to life, relishing every bruise, wound, and broken bone from the car crash that killed me moments ago.

They then covered me in white sheet. If my heart was beating at that moment, it would have accelerated. Because I knew what would happen next, where they would take me.

I was bound to be embalmed alive.

"Stop," I wanted to scream at them. "There has to be something wrong. I'm not dead!" Panic rose up my chest as they brought me to the morgue. Still, no words, not even a single breath, escaped my lifeless but fully conscious lips. Pain increased as each second passed by that I was not taking a breath. And I thought for a moment that maybe, being embalmed alive would indeed mercifully end this misery, that I'd be truly dead and not be in this unimaginably horrible state of being totally aware of everything, yet paralysed.

But I was wrong. The entire process, I felt everything. Right from discreetly sewing my lips and eyelids shut to keep them asleep-looking, down to draining my blood, disemboweling me, and replacing all my bodily fluids with embalming liquid. Everything.

At that point, as the mortician dressed me up in an uncomfortably itchy fabric, I accepted my atrocious fate. I was in an existential nightmare. I can't die. I won’t die.

The funeral afterwards was a breeze. The lamentations I longed to hear from loved ones when I was alive, they sounded muffled and inaudible through the closed coffin. But still, the thoughts and sincerity were there. This eternal agony was temporarily relieved by the numbness from the embalming fluid in my veins and the rigor mortis setting in.

However, real hell begins when you're down there six feet underground. Eventually, the chemicals wore off. It started with an itchy crawling sensation just under the skin, then it became the searing hot painful feeling of my body decomposing. I felt every crawling insect, worm, or whatever they are gnawing through my flesh for god knows how long. All the while I could do nothing but cry internally, and wonder what bad things did I do in my life to deserve this torment.

I don’t know if everyone else who died went through this, or for how long. Or if it was maybe just me. And how about those who were cremated? Would they remain conscious of every single whiff of their ash, the same way I somehow know—and feel—each part of me decomposed, eaten by worms, and is now going back to earth? How could we have known? No one ever came back from being *this* dead to tell the tale. Once it’s your time, you’ll just know.