Death

What a great subject. I'm surprised I didn't write about it before today. The end of one's life is, in our culture, something considered mostly negative. At least it is for those who still live. We cry those who leave our world. We created many mechanisms, through spirituality and beliefs, to get over our losses. 

I know you might not like what I will say, but we are most of the time self-centered. To mourn is somehow an expression of this self-centerness. However, when you think about death. It's like the end of a book. When you start reading, you know the story will come to an end and that's the purpose of reading it. To get through it, enjoy it and know its end. Whatever it's a sad, happy, short, long, filled or empty story. You share something with the "author" while "reading" it. That's life.

I know some will say that you can't compare a life with a book. The relation you create with a book isn't as strong as a relation with a living person. I agree with you. The level of emotions is more likely to be more important. So when you finish a book, you can't feel the same in comparaison when someone's story ends. And I haven't talked about how it ends. Sometimes the circumstances are awful. Where I live, in the province of Quebec, we had 3 horror story lately. There is this cardiologist who stabbed his two children because his wife was cheating on him. This couple who beat a 4 years old boy to death. And this 2 months old baby who's cryings, because her arm was broken, drove his father crazy enough to shake her to death. 

So you might think it is unfair for them. To have their lives taken away like this. Unfair also for those who loved them. And you are damn right. It is unfair. That's the whole idea about death. When granted the privilege of life, nature never gave any living creature a waranty. For many reasons, we feel and live otherwise. Like is a right the society or even life itself  owe to you. That every man should live until his body can't. The cold truth is it will never be this way. So I question the spirit of our cultural relation with death.

I think we feel sad about death, because we are rarely prepared for it. We don't live like the next chapter, the next page might be the last and we don't expect others to live also like that. For this reason, I think we don't respect death enough. It is inevitable, whenever it happens at 90 or 30 or 9 or 3. It will happen. I know it's hard to not expect to live X years and do whatever we want to do with our lives, but we live like this because we forgot our lives has no warranties. Taking it for granted is, to me, disrespectful of what nature is : unfair.

I want you to try to disconnect with our cultural relation with death and think about it. Would it be possible to praise death like we praise life? Would we have more respect in life if we respect death the way it should be? I'm asking this because I'm wondering if the lives of the kids in the three stories above would have been taken away from them if we had more respect and a more "happy" relation with death. Because they died as some sort of punishment for really bad reasons. Death shouldn't be a punishment. It's the end of a book. It's sometimes the best part. It is inevitable and it should be as important as life is whenever it happens before having white hairs.