When I was eighteen, I attended a total of six funerals in my summer vacation between schoolyears. The experience of being present for my bereaved friends, or being bereft myself, totally changed me.

Now it no longer matters to me if someone I know dies. The only reaction I have is “we all have to die some day; oh well.” It is the final inevitability, and though I will miss the people I have lost over the years I have chosen not to dishonor their memory by dwelling on the fact that they are gone, for whatever reason: murder, sickness, accident.

Rhesa N. and I had a short online discussion about death that inspired this post of hers:

A friend and I were discussing this last night and it made me think a bit on how I truly view death. Death itself is painless, if one thinks about it. One can die from painful health problems (i.e. terminal illness, torture, etc.), one can die because of an idiotic choice or reckless behavior, and/or one can die because it was one’s time to die. There’s of course the matter of believing in an afterlife, which is a subject I’ll try to skip in this post.

I’ll discuss my view of an afterlife: there is none. We live, we die. The closest semblance of an afterlife is what we leave behind in the memories of those who remember us. History is our afterlife, and history is a cruel judge indeed.

Why this apparent nihilism? Why the seeming casual attitude towards people dying?

I think that life, the one that we are given, the only one we have, is too precious to be spent in preparation for an afterlife. There is no promise, no certainty, that I will be alive in the minutes between I write this word and when I click on the “publish” button of my blogware. There is no promise that I will awaken from the sleep that I will have to go through to keep myself alive. Nor is there a promise that something I do not even know exists will conitnue to live on in a place that I do not know even exists.

Having said that, there is no reason either, for me to court death to come for me as soon as possible. I want to live. I want to do certain things, I want to grow a bit older, a bit wiser. I want to finish the book I am working on. I want to one day look in the mirror with my shirt off and see a six-pack between my chest and my waist. I want to go places. I want to meet people. I want to do everything that I want to do for as long as I am alive.

There is only life, and there is meaning.