Life, or Lack Thereof (or Grim News)

I don't want to spend too much time addressing my absence, but I feel like I've got some explaining to do. I goofed. I meant to write about things for a while, but I put it off, and put it off, and I finally decided to man up and write a post. Not that it matters much, but I did write another post, but it wasn't submitted because I felt it was sub-par.

You might notice that this post is significantly longer than some of my others. Hopefully that will make anyone with vengeful feelings feel a tiny bit better.

Death, in many ways, defines life. If there wasn't the threat of death, how would we define life? Death is a lot less prevalent nowadays in our everyday lives, when life expectancies skyrocketed and most of us never see a corpse outside of the media. Media has desensitized death a lot, specifically video games, as death can be both a reward for a job well done, and a slap on the wrist for a job done horrendously. (But don't expect me to go on a tangent about video games being Satanic death and sex simulators. They are not. That's a topic for another time.)

Theoretically, we shouldn't have a problem with death. Without death, we wouldn't have another generation to teach, and to take over after us. Life would lose all sense of urgency, as things that you would have done today can be put off for years and years and years. Death is the great motivator, the force that actually gets us moving and gets us doing.

But it can't be that simple. Most people's problems with death stem from the unknown. We, as a species, have a fear of the unknown. It is the same pathological sense that gives us a fear of the dark, because anything can be in that blackness.

I don't want to believe that nothing happens. I don't want to believe that the heart stops, the blood ceases to flow, and that's it. But wanting doesn't mean a lot.

A lot of religions believe in an afterlife, one that rewards those who did well by others and punishes those who did not. A great incentive to be a nice person, which may or may not be the cause of the belief in the afterlife. People flock to comfort. I doubt many people would conform to a religion in which it was said that after death, everyone gets kicked in the face for the rest of eternity.

Furthermore, why is it assumed that humans are the only species that gets the afterlife treatment. What, according to the religions that advocate afterlives,  happens to monkeys after they die? The concept of an afterlife just seems so human-centric that it doesn't make much sense to me. Are orangutans considered too filthy or too lowly to pass the entrance? Tough bouncer, I guess.

That leaves a couple other alternatives to what happens after you die. I won't get too much into those, as it is useless to spend much time speculating as to what happens after death, as there isn't much you can do to prove any of it.

But even if it could be proven, I don't think I'd want an answer. A single, final word on the matter would be utterly soul-crushing, one way or the other. I want to think about the pros and cons of each theory, I want to consider it. Mysteries lose all intrigue when we start to understand them. That's why Earth has become so boring. We know exactly where everything is and when it came there. That's why space is so exciting.

Just a note: I once conceived an idea that people's souls, or whatever you call them, stay in the body after death and just can't move or talk. All they could do was think. I wrote 4 short stories on them ( cleverly entitled Death: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four), but I've long since lost them.

One of the aspects of death that really frightens me is how I will be viewed after death. It is tradition to kind of just forget everything bad that relatively good people have ever done. I don't like that. Glorifying people who have died doesn't change what they had done. By the same logic, people who are noted as bad have ever good action of their's wiped from their record. I don't like that.

When I leave this world, if I'm remembered in any significant degree, I don't want to be made a hero or a villian. I want to be remembered as a person. One who had done good things, one who had done bad things, one who said great things, one who did stupid things, one who was, in every sense of the phrase, a mixed bag. No one was or is completely evil or saintly.

Death may seem scary to some people, and it definitely is. To hang on the edge of the abyss and take a step (or more appropriately, have the cliff recede until you stand over nothing), not knowing how large the gap is or if there is anything at the bottom: terrifying. But we shouldn't obsess over it.

Death will happen whether or not we fight it. Immortality shimmers in the distance, but for now (which may only be the next fifty or sixty years, believe it or not) we are stuck with death at the end of our stories.

And I'm okay with that.

Thanks for reading and considering,
-J. Valett