Death: Life's Final Page

by: Valred Olsim

They say life is a mystery to be solved, a riddle, the ultimate puzzle that can only be deciphered through living it. For centuries, writers and poets have written loads of literary pieces, not just to celebrate life, but to mystify the human experience called, “existence”. It struck me, however, as a cynic, that this proposition is trying to disguise the most important part of life: Death.

Sometimes, life is really simple; you‘re born, you live, and then ultimately, you die. Death, as a subject, has been always avoided, not just by conformist writers (which I’m already sick of), but nearly every soul you want to talk it with. None of us seems psychologically ready to the idea of permanent unconsciousness, whether to others or to ourselves. We always seem to deny the condition of being lost to nothingness and its cold grip that haunts our human thought. The idea is simply, terrifying and different from the day to day events that we are used to face. Death’s reality and its closeness have always inspired methods that would help us cope with the anxiety and fear that we repress. We disguise its power through mystification, religion, jokes and euphemisms such that we forget about its terror; much like hiding from the glares of a monster. We hide our eyes from its face, but still we spread our fingers just a bit, because there’s something in us that just can’t resist a peek.

Death is never the other side of life as others claim; it is just part of a vicious cycle that everyone will go through. The truth is, nobody knows what lies there; whether there is an after-life as they call it, or maybe nothing, but an empty vacuum. See, what scares us is our weakness and inability to know – our “innate fear of the unknown”. Still, we try to conceal its presence and live our life as though we can live forever.

I have nothing against the conformist and optimistic view of life and death. Certainly, it is not a crime to hide the dark and absurd reality of life by covering it up with flowers and rainbows. It’s just that I am bothered by how humans have become conceited even with its mortality; we have successfully reached the moon but have never visited our closest neighbor, we have made a lot of discoveries but have not discovered the secret to happiness, we have advanced technologically but have moved backward with out our ideals and values, indeed, we have forgotten the only thing that can humble us.

I have my own experience of watching a person you know or even you’re close with disappear from the face of the earth. It is painful; it takes a long time to realize that it is the nature of life that you must accept. I wrote about death not to scare anyone, but to remind us once more of studying how we have been living this temporary state. It is very evident that we have all been caught with the false and tempting promise of this material world; that, we are obsessed with the latest gadgets, money and property as if these are the only things in life. We have become soaked with vanity and triviality as if death is not looming in the corners. I wrote this for us to perhaps, stop for awhile and think about our lives and how we make every second valuable; after all, life is so short.