We’re Going to Die

2,448,017 Americans died in 2005. 652,091 were from heart disease; 559,312 from cancer; 117,809 were from accidents. Gun deaths were interesting: 12,352 people were murdered with a gun, while 17,002 people killed themselves with one.

Every month, roughly 20 women in Papua New Guinea are accused of being a witch, tortured, and publicly burned alive.

In 2017, Chechnya began exterminating homosexuals within her borders in “Gay Concentration Camps.”

To us, these are not human beings (mothers, brothers, best friends, co-workers, etc.), they are numbers. They are statistics. And like it or not, no matter how hard you try, you will someday join the ranks of those calculated integers.

“It’s hard to be optimistic when you know you’re going to die,” wrote Neil Strauss in his book Emergency after spending years discovering how to survive nearly every possible situation known to mankind. He faced natural dangers, human dangers, toxins, et al, and gives details accounts of how to overcome and survive them all.

The book ends somewhat bluntly with an account of a 19-year-old girl getting hit by an SUV while crossing the street. Her body goes flying yards into the air. No amount of survival skills can prepare you for freak accidents. You can’t outrun the reaper forever.

For some reason, when I saw the film Annihilation, I was hit by the fact that I will die someday and whatever comes after is it. Like, that’s all. I cannot do anything else that I had planned on; I can’t fulfill unrealized dreams or say anything else to my loved ones. I can’t go out and have another meal or sit in another coffee shop. When that moment comes, when my SUV finds me on my crosswalk, that’s it. Period. End of sentence.

I realized how desensitized we’ve become to death the other day when I opened up the newspaper (it’s like Facebook but made out of big pieces of paper) and this was one of the top stories:

The attention-grabber in this story is the death of a [yes, fictitious] person. You can see that the author mentions that whoever the unlucky candidate is “won’t live to see the final credits.” No, Michael, they won’t live to see anything else, will they?

I know that this article was about fictional characters, but I think that the constant formation by Hollywood of our thoughts on death treat it so casually. A thousand buildings explode and bodies litter the post-battle streets, but then we get to get up and throw away the half of our popcorn we didn’t eat.

Do you realize that one day, YOU will be one of those bodies? That one day, YOU won’t get to get up and say a few more things to your bestie, nor will you get to change your mind about this topic or take a trip to that country?

Perhaps one of the scariest things about death is that you go into it naked.

Whatever it is you believe lies in wait for you on the far side of the curtain, you don’t get to dress up to impress them. You don’t get to hide behind your money, your job, or the grades your kid got on his high school transcript. Or your transcript. Your intellect won’t wow the Judge, nor will your toned body woo the fellow dead in the cemetery.

I’ve realized that we spend so much of our time (aka, our life) constructing walls behind which to hide. I can’t tell you how many days of my life have been spent worrying about my looks or shopping for clothes which will hopefully take me to that next ‘level’ of society.

Impressing people earns you no merit postmortem. You walk through that door buck naked, with no meritorious degrees, exotic cars or fashionable clothes.

Too often, this line of thought becomes distilled into the coy maxim You can’t take it with you, but far too rarely do we think about this and meditate on it. If you think this post is too dark for a Christian writer, look no further than the Bible to remind us of our own mortality. The psalmist instructs us to number our days; to remember that each one has a number and that number only goes up, never back down. You can only live it once and you have a finite number of days allotted. Maybe your number goes up a little when you eat more kale, but that SUV is coming for you. And it will not miss.

There is a cow skull on the wall of this bar. I don’t think it was put there as a memento mori, but it’s working. Even animals are made uniquely. That bull was not the same animal as his sister. James Cromwell, who played the farmer in the film Babe, said that he became a vegetarian after making that film because he realized that he participated in the death of these animals which he had come to care for. Their unique ‘personalities’ will never again be realized on this earth.