A short reminder of your impending doom
And why it means everything to you
Lately, I have been giving death a lot of thought.
Perhaps it is due to the content of the news.
A young woman, trapped in a small toilet cubicle, hearing her very famous lover screaming and being surprised by the first bullet tearing through the toilet door and smashing through her hip. Then three more shots that eventually extinguishes her life.
A perfectly functioning Boeing 777 purposefully turning away from its 239 destinations of homecomings and business meetings and holidays in Beijing to the unwelcoming depths of the Indian Ocean.
A ferry, filled with 400 odd school children on their way to a school outing, unwittingly following the advice of the crew to stay put as the boat begins to list.
All of these dead newsmakers have one thing in common. They had no say about their appointment with death. Just an invisible, unstoppable hand, pushing them along to their grim end.
Maybe my recent preoccupation with death is borne out of my upcoming 39th birthday this weekend. The penultimate birthday of my 30s. After this, I’m middle-aged. The invisible hand is pushing me along too. For how long, I don’t know.
Being alive is like steadily climbing up a very tall rickety old ladder. As you go higher, the laddder becomes more unstable. It starts wobbling around on its footing. But you have to keep climbing, higher up into the clouds until you reach the tipping point where it becomes so unstable that it starts toppling over on that glorious arc to your end.
Whether you believe in a God, or not, the objective reality is that you were injected into matter that finds itself expanding and growing in this thin blue biosphere that surrounds this nondescript planet orbiting a very usual and small star. Your matter contains a brain that records experiences, can feel — and impact on the other matter that shares this point in space and time with you. This matter is prone to disease. It is fragile and can cease to grow suddenly if it gets in the way of bullets, oncoming trains or the wrong end of a traffic accident. Over a long enough timeline, it will grow so fragile that it will cease to function well and give out. So, as sure as you were born you will die. And you don’t know when.
It would have been impossible for any of the passengers boarding their midnight flight to Beijing to comprehend that in a few short hours they would be in a watery grave. Or for the Korean school kids, fretting about homework and music lessons and the budding blossoms of love and other feelings inside them to know that their obedience to their crew’s words would lock them in the sinking hull of the ferry.
Scanning through Reeva Steenkamp’s twitter feed, in the days and hours before her last few seconds in that cubicle, you would realise she had no idea that she would not see the sun rise again. A life, unexpectedly interrupted by the force of Black Talon ammunition, fired at close range by the person she loved.
Death. It is both inevitable and unpredictable. And whatever you choose to believe, death will change everything about your life. It will remove you from all the experiences in this sphere and nothing will be the same again. Perhaps you will be in a different realm. Or perhaps there will be nothing at all. Not one remaining memory.
When you wake up in the morning, and as you open your eyes you should remind yourself that you may not return to that bed at the end of the day. Because that memory in itself will compel you to extract as much from every minute that ticks away till you do find yourself back where you started your day.
If you love life, you should embrace the thought of death everyday.
