Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment in quantum physics used to explain the concept of superposition. But that's not important. The gist of it is that the cat in a box could be either alive or dead and you don't know until you check. In other words, the cat is both alive and dead.
Time to switch gears. I was looking at some old photographs of soldiers on the front lines in WWII. I looked into the eyes of young men that I did not know and noticed something curious about their gaze. They knew that the next charge could be their last. They had watched their brothers in arms gunned down around them and knew it was by sheer luck that it had not been them.
While these men were technically alive, it occurred to me that they were also dead. A photo had captured Schrödinger's warriors in a state of mental superposition.
In the months following, I started to notice something odd. I started to see those eyes on the faces of the living. This was not a war-zone, but they were in a fight for their lives. They were fighting an invisible war, perhaps the worst kind, against themselves. These warriors are jumping out of their trenches each day to go about their daily lives. Many a warrior intuitively understands the war they are fighting may eventually result in their undoing.
And so Schrödinger's Warrior accepts death while fighting it, and in so doing, escapes its grasp. For the only way to escape death is to reconcile with it while living.
To all the Schrödinger's Warriors out there; your battles may not be visible to the rest of us, but that does not make them any less real. Please understand that no matter how dead you feel inside you also can be alive. And thankfully, we are the ones who get to observe our state and determine our fate.