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DEATH. We shutter at the thought of it. The very idea of it makes us scared and uncomfortable. We go our whole lives trying to avoid what is inevitably our final act. We banish the idea to a dark place in our minds and hope, hopelessly, that we’ll never have to face it, until we do. Few things, at least in the West, have such a universally notorious reputation such as that of death. We despise it. It always seems to come unexpected, too early, or at the worst time. Our repulsion to it seems to be only matched by the prevalence of it. Every day, every hour, every second people are busy dying all the time. It's all too common. Each and every one of us, even before we meet our maker, become well acquainted with death. Our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, dogs, cats and fishes will all die, and we’ll have to bury them. But even, still we quiver. Of course the nature of what dying entails is unknown to us. What will it be like? Is it oblivion? Will we be reunited with people long past or maybe reincarnated? The answer has escaped us for as long as we’ve been here and with that comes the fear. It's as if death is a familiar stranger who is always near us but still distant. Countless answers, or rather imaginations, have been offered but all of them still leave us with that feeling, the fear. We feel as though nothing else can betray life more than death.

The problem with death, or how I've come to understand it, is that of consciousness. Humans, for all intents and purposes, are animals. We are primates, sharing 98% of our DNA with monkeys. The differences between a human and any mammal embryo is barely recognizable. What complicates these similarities is unlike them. It seems we have evolved to perceive that we are alive, and therefore there will be a time we will cease being alive. When a lion in the Serengeti is hunting, eating, and doing all he can to live, I scarcely doubt (not that I know for sure) that he is thinking about his demise beyond anything more than his biological needs. He eats because he has to, finds water because he needs to, and lives his life without the fear that comes with knowing and not knowing. We too eat because we need to, and drink water because we must. But our consciousness can’t help but remind us that as we tend to all of our biological needs, there are mental ones that can never be truly remedied, because we cannot make peace with the thought of death and what dying means. It leaves even the most religious of us with a dreadful inclination, one that is possibly even scarier than dying: “Is this all worth it?” Why must we suffer, struggle, and endure if at the end of it all we die just as the beasts do? 

How then should we ease the dread that’s produced. One has to devise a framework that allows us to reconcile with the inevitable. What actually is death? In defining death, we have to first juxtapose it to what we colloquially use as its opposite: living. Well what does it mean to be living? One must be alive to be living, so is the inverse of death being alive? What then is being alive? Is it our breath, or our heartbeat, or the various goings-on of our body? Is a tree alive? It breathes and grows and even has its own intricate way of eating. One would be mad to suggest a tree isn’t alive. But does a tree know of its own living and its eventual death as we do? Being alive then is a useless understanding for what I’m trying to convey. Being alive doesn’t make us any different from that fly you tried to crush yesterday. What we mean when we say we are alive is in fact that we exist, and we know it. One cannot truly exist if one is unaware. Take for instance a chair—the chair exists but only to us; they know not of themselves. What of the tree? Does a tree know of its own nature? It is alive, yes, but it only exists insofar as it is a physical structure with leaves and a trunk. It is really only a tree to us. Does it perceive itself in any way that can produce the same uneasiness that awareness can produce. Cogito, ergo sum. When Descartes uttered his famous quote, he affirmed that true being is the knowing of it. So this more than anything is what Death is, when your existence becomes unknown to you. It’s why dying is the great unknowable because we lose the facilities—our consciousness—to make sense of it. But existence, if viewed in terms outside of what we consider ourselves, does not actually cease when we die, and this is the solace I wish to impart. 

The moment before you were born and the moment after your death are one and the same. Billions of years have happened before you knew you existed, and billions of years will happen in the after. The two states are actually more familiar to us than that of living. Our conscious existence only amounts for even the oldest of us to one hundred and twenty years. When we die, we are in fact returning to a state of being that is a far larger part of our story. Death only dismantles our consciousness; everything else is only transformed. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. We are just that: matter. The skin and bones and cartilage that we call the “you” are just particles and space debris. The same matter that is found in the atmosphere is found in you. These have always existed since the beginning of time. Before your consciousness, they never bothered wondering about death and being. Just as the chair, they simply were. But then for some cosmic reason, those same particles came together to form your mind. Thus, for a brief moment in history, you were able to perceive the unfathomable proposition of being a human. You see, humans are but a brief composition of matter. One could argue we are in fact a disturbance. Maybe we weren’t meant to know of our time here; maybe that's why it seems our existence is so fraught with dread. The dread is the innate feeling that we are living on borrowed time. That in a blink of an eye, the universe can come and collect what belongs to it: its bodies, its hearts, its consciousness, all of it. We cling to this unnatural state of knowing because it is all we can know. It damns us to fight against all attempts to show us the real truth of our beings. We bury our dead in wooden boxes and stone monuments in a losing battle to keep them as we remembered. To keep them here, suspended in a way that makes sense to us. We dress them in clothes they will not wear, and put them in shoes they will not need where they are going, to a place (unbeknownst to them) they've been before, whence we all came. 

I take solace in this understanding, when I think of the many a souls that have been and then snuffed out by the hand of death. That being alive as we define it has always been temporary, and that existence is eternal. The pain that follows when we have to face death—and we will have to face it—should be tempered by the fact that our next plane of existence is much less confused. It isn’t tainted with fear and isn’t ponderous. We simply are. Think of the life you have, all the beauty and happiness and misery and dread as a gift or maybe even a curse that wasn’t ever meant to last. Think of life as betraying existence and live it as though you can stop any second. When we lose someone to death, it will be frightening and sad. The grief and pain and all that come with it will still be there. But rest assured, they are free now, in a place less complicated by knowing and unshackled by being. They will be repurposed in the behemoth that is the universe. They will breathe again, but not like you breathe. They will live again, but not like you live. Their consciousness will be that of the breeze and stars, a place where we will soon be with them, unbound by the weight of death and life.