A Choice....

[Clueless Morgan]

1. You may know the exact date and time of your death, but not the nature or cause.

2. You may know the exact nature and cause of your death, but not the date and time.

#2 for sure.

My concerns about death don't lay in when it might happen or in whether there is or isn't an afterlife, it lays in whether I will suffer greatly before I die. Knowing that I die in my sleep in a painless way wouldn't bother me greatly and wouldn't prevent me from going to sleep every night, but if given a choice I would like to know whether I die of a prolonged, difficult and pain-riddled battle with cancer or some disease so that I could at least make an attempt to mentally prepare myself for going through something like that.

Knowing the circumstances of your death could lead to you inferring a timeline, too. You would know that if you die in an airplane crash you must first get on the airplane, or if you know that you die of a prolonged battle with rectal cancer you would probably first be diagnosed and then enter some kind of treatment program.

And as others have pointed out, there might be ways of avoiding those circumstances, though I can see how knowing the circumstances of your death might do nothing in terms of successfully avoiding it: suicide attempts could fail, you could be kidnapped and put on the plane you ultimately die on (though presumably that information would be divulged in the "exact nature and cause" part of option #2)...