Sunday, May 14, 2017

How to talk about death

'Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?' Douglas Adams


Everyone will be dead. Someday. Normally, we do not focus on presence of the death in our lives. Everything is mortal: animals, trees, plants, people, etc, and there is no chance we could change it. The awareness of that fact is so overwhelming for a human being and therefore we invented a religion. A promise of a new, splendid life in a better world, where everybody is equal, is so seducing that most society claims to believe in God. 

Of course, everybody has a reason to believe, but basically it is the fact that we cannot cope with our solitude and meaningless in the world. Everyone wishes to be special, live a good life and have a hope to get a second chance. We would like to believe that everything makes sense, the death as well. The absurdity of existence is something unacceptable for us.

Meanwhile, there is no premise who will spend the autumn of his life with the beloved one and who will decease at the age of 20. The friend of Hemingway, and the archetype of character from “The Old Man and the Sea”, used to smoke a lot of cigars. Indeed, he died of lung cancer, but at the age of 103.

Maybe we should talk about the death without grandiloquence because there is nothing grandiloquent about it?


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