Death, at least in our society, holds the strangest connotation: “unfortunate”. By definition, having bad fortune. Would this not be the most ironic statement in the history of humanity?
We hear recountances of tragic endings, of young souls taken before their time or the slow, prolonged decay of an elderly patient in isolation. It isn’t to say that there aren’t certain aspects of the transitory process that could have seen improvement – the way life was led prior to the end – but to consider the end of life itself to be a tragedy is a sorely misplaced descriptor.
At nearly every other juncture of life – graduation, marriage, promotion, etc. – we celebrate life before as the culmination of perseverance and effort, happily reflecting on how time was spent to allow for the next marvelous transition to take place. We don’t hold remorse towards the exchange, mainly because we position the next step as more positive than the next.
When it comes to death, we really have no grounds to assume that the other side will be any worse than this side. On the contrary, acceptance of our own death and mortality can bring about a sense of liberation from our everyday stressors, acknowledging that we are all just dust in the wind. Everything we cling to and obsess over will ultimately fall away into nothingness, including the people we hold closest.
This can be a frightening fact to confront – the thought of letting go of everything we have ever known. Indeed, the idea of losing it all can cause us to turn from death, but it is actually the conscious acceptance of our death that will bring us into the love that encompasses us all, that holds us and carries us through the joys and tribulations of this existence. Love is the deepest rooted fabric of our life.
So, in anticipation of death, let us not focus on our fear of the unknown, but instead live in the joy of this moment, preparing ourselves for when the great passing will come—when we embark to cross the great divide from this adventure to the next.