(Maybe) Death is a Privilege
Consider the alternative
We don’t want to die. We don’t want those we love to die. We hate and fear death so much that we spend our lives distracting ourselves from this universal truth.
Everyone dies
This has been something of an obsession of mine since Mom and Daddy woke me up when I was, I think, four years old to tell me that our cat, Gypsy, got hit by a car and was dead. Yes, the Death Talk in the middle of the night when I was four.
And then they wondered why I began having nightmares every night, turning bedtime into a protracted battle for years.
Over decades of writing, thinking, worrying, contemplating, railing against, and despairing over the oncoming death of me and those I love, I’ve developed an alternate narrative. What if death is a privilege and the immortality that people have craved since time immemorial would be a vile, miserable, and inescapable curse?
Probably the fondest and most immovable human wish is to live forever
Fiction is ridden with the stuff and has been for millennia. The Epic of Gilgamesh dates back to 2100 BC and exhaustively charts our hero’s, Gilgamesh’s, search for life immortal. Spoiler alert: he fails. Long before literature was…
