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It's an interesting exercise to write down the associations one has of death, but doing so without laboring. First thought, best thought.

Death... ending, annihilation, desolate, free, sad, lonely, love, peace, serenity, loss, pain, tears, longing, wishing, withering, emaciated, numb, choking, coffin, worms, embalming, gruesome, eternity, motionless, no worries, no stress, ice cold, gray skin, skull, protruding bones, emptiness, stillness.

Death is a mixture of "good and bad"--constructs my mind uses to evaluate everything. Death is a word that attaches to other words and images. Each adjective and noun elicited a sharp, though transient emotional reaction. Within thirty seconds time I was jolted from one association to another. I felt relieved when my mind stopped associating. Of course, I could go back for more, but the list I came up with was quite enough.

In actuality, death can't encompass all of the images and ideas that I associate with it. Death is bigger than all the pictures, memories, constructions I have stored up over a lifetime. Death is as vast as the sky; Allen Ginsberg understood its vastness, and pointed to just this in his death poem, which appears in DEATH AND FAME: LAST POEMS:

To see Void vast infinite
look out the window
in the blue sky.

*******
sun-bleached sand
no beginning
no end