Death really is the great equalizer in life. There is no coming back from it. No one person is excluded from it. Eventually it will catch up with us all. I think it’s funny how we treat people who have died. We dress the dead in expensive clothing, laying them in expensive caskets, and bury them in picturesque garden settings… all for what? They aren’t appreciating the view. I have yet to hear a dead man complain about being buried in old tennis shoes.
Perhaps most particular of all is how we let death turn even the nastiest of people into saints. We might be allowed to think bad of the person in the casket, but heaven forbid we say it aloud. I think that there is an unwritten rule we all have subscribed to. If you say only nice things about a person after their gone, then somebody will say nice things about you. Maybe.
For example, I loved Michael Jackson. I was a fan of his music, I have all his CDs. The man was a talent… but he was weird. At his funeral Al Sharpton spoke to his kids and said that their daddy wasn’t strange. It might have been strange, what he had to go through, but the man himself was not. Really? As much as I would like to believe Al on this one, he’s wrong. The man himself was strange.
We’re all scared of death. Nobody knows what comes next if anything. There are competing religions and philosophies about what happens, but nobody can be ever be 100% sure. And regardless of the people you know and love in your life, everybody dies alone. Nobody gets to share that experience with you.
August 28, 2009 at 9:27 pm
I have the distinct feeling that if we didn’t die, we would never get anything done. It would be an endless litany of “I’ll do it tomorrow, next month, next century.” Death reminds us to LIVE . . .
August 31, 2009 at 8:18 am
I would agree with this. 110% actually. Even with the relentless ticking of time in my ear I suffer from a bad enough case of procrastination.