Disclaimer: Sorry to disappoint you, but I still don't own Pirates of the Caribbean.

"Do you fear death?"

Davy Jones's question takes me by surprise. My immediate impulse is to say, "Of course; doesn't everyone?" But clearly some people don't, or else he wouldn't be asking the question.

I consider for a moment. What does it mean to fear death? Presumably more than just not liking the idea of physical decay: Jones's own sailors are pretty effectively decayed, but they're not dead – or not in the sense he means, anyway.

Oblivion, then? No, that can't be right, either. He's here because I'm on the brink of death; he can't expect me to still believe that nothing lies beyond the grave. The dying know that to be false, whatever else they don't know.

And there's plenty I don't know, to be sure. What will happen to me if I don't take his offer? Will what awaits me be agreeable, or miserable beyond compare? Nothing that I see can tell me. Perhaps that's what Jones means by fearing death: being willing to do anything, anything at all, if it means that I can avoid falling into that unknowable abyss.

Yes, that must be it. That's the sort of question I can imagine someone answering yes to. To walk into the darkened forest, and know that the wolves won't tear you apart: that takes a level of faith beyond the common.

And faith was never something I had in great supply. All those times Marianne tried to convince me that the Power behind the universe loved me and gave His life for me, I never paid her any heed, never concerned myself with the obligations that would be upon me if it should be true. I always desired, above all things, to be my own man – to be indebted to no one, not even to God.

And it's only now – now that I am clinging to a broken board in the middle of the Atlantic, with the Lord of the Sea waiting to claim my soul – that I see what a fool I was. A man can never escape being indebted, for debt is entwined with the nature of man: his very life is loaned to him by his father's seed, and can be claimed from him at any moment by a wave or a stroke of lightning. Only one thing gives him the least dignity: that he knows of his debt, and can choose whether he will pay it off to the mindless cosmos or to the Mind that controls all things except his choice.

And, seeing this, I bow my head for the first time in my life; I acknowledge my debt, and beg forgiveness for having so long neglected it. To my surprise, what follows is not humiliation, but peace – a deeper peace than I have ever known – the peace of one who has gone ahead and dived into the water, and can now get on with learning to swim.

Do you fear death?

I lift my gaze to meet Jones's eyes, and give him the only answer possible.

"Not anymore."

Since for the Death remeid is none,
Best is that we for Death dispone,
After our death that live may we;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

-William Dunbar, "Lament for the Makaris"