The only person close to me that I've had pass away was Eric, who I wrote about earlier this month, on the fifth anniversary of his death. I'm not trying to pish-posh his death, but it's not the same as a parent or sibling or child dying, obviously. And I've never had someone with that sort of closeness, someone who was truly a part and parcel of who I was as a person, pass away.
I bring this up because I feel like it probably has some sort of influence on how I feel about death and how I view it.
See, I've always struggled to understand people who were profoundly affected by death. That probably comes off as cold and/or callous, but it's true.
Watch me try to justify this after the break.
Fear is going to be a theme on the blog this week, it seems. Because I believe that all of this profound affectation regarding the death of loved ones is a product of fear. People fear death. It's routinely in the top three fears of people in the world. But they don't only fear their own death, but also the death of others.
It's this fear that drives two seemingly contradictory things: first, a moral nose in the air toward physician-assisted suicide and a deep conviction toward keeping the death penalty. See, in a world where death is a fearful thing, it becomes the one thing most in need of avoiding by the good people of the world and the greatest punishment that people who have done wrong can face.
But that doesn't necessarily make either of those things true.
I've written before about the ultimate pointlessness of spiritual beliefs before, and they need reiteration here as they're an important point of the argument I'm making. Essentially, I don't know if we need to believe in anything spiritual-- be that an actual religion or the idea of atheism or agnosticism. Spiritual beliefs were created to give their believers a template of how to live their lives. In a modern society, where those rules have been formalized, spiritual beliefs become unnecessary to the continuation of the population.
See, spirituality counter-intuitively gets in the way of viewing death as another part of normal life. By giving death a special Before and After type of definition, by marking things as "life" and "afterlife" it necessarily separates people who have died from those of us who have not, and this makes us seem lonely; if someone is not with us, so to speak, we feel disconnected from them. But in a world where death is seen as a natural thing, they are still always with us.
Spirituality also dilutes the power of memory in regard to death. By telling people they will see people in the afterlife, or giving "life after death" a certain weight, it tells us that our memory is insufficient to pay proper homage to people who have passed away, that their histories are incapable of being properly chronicled by our own experiences with them.
All that, basically, leads to fear. As much love is insisted upon in the New Testament in particular, most spirituality seems to actually be a breeding ground for fear.
And this is, ultimately, why I don't understand the typical human reaction to death. Like I acknowledged, it could be due to the fact that I've had no personal proximity to it, but death's inevitability seemed less like a problem and more like... Well, if it's something that's going to happen no matter what, then what's the big point of worrying about it?
To me, I've often followed that maxim from Peter Pan: "To die will be an awfully big adventure."
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