Many faiths try to minimize the tragedy of death. That’s not fair though. In fact, death is perhaps life’s greatest tragedy. Life isn’t easy. It takes work to build a life. None of us gets to decide whether we exist or not. By the time we even understand existence, we are already here. Once we understand our predicament–the predicament of being alive–we’re already involved in the day-to-day grind of building a life we can be proud of or, at the very least, survive. Day after day, we wake and we struggle to become. We work to move forward, to learn, and to grow. And then, suddenly, without our consent, that project terminates.
Death doesn’t just destroy me though. It destroys everyone. In this way, death isn’t only the end of my personal project; it is also the loss of love. There’s nothing we value more in life than our connections with each other. The love we feel for a parent or a child or a friend is in no small way what gives our lives meaning. Death doesn’t just come for us though–it comes for the objects of our love as well. Every human, no matter how undeserving, no matter how innocent, no matter how loved, will someday end. Death is the end of all those we value most.
Finally, death isn’t just an unfitting end to a lifetime of struggle and those we love. It is also permanent and irreversible. This is perhaps the aspect of death that crushed me most when I was a child. In the Disney movie, it wasn’t just that two friends were no longer friends. It was that their friendship and everything they’d built together were gone forever.
With death, there is no re-do. We don’t get to take everything we’ve learned and apply it to our next struggle. We don’t get to see how our life’s work affects the future and consider what we could have done better or enjoy the fruits of our labor. With death, there is no tomorrow. When we reach our end, that’s it. Death isn’t only non-existence. It’s not only the end. It’s the end forever, and that finality is hard to bear.
Looking back at that simple story of a child who first discovered the tragedy of death from a Disney movie gives us our first reason why we deny death. We deny death because it is the greatest tragedy that can befall any of us. It’s the end of a life’s worth of work. It’s the end of our loved ones. And perhaps worst of all, it’s an end with no beginning–the end of my story forever.