Death

Terry Pratchett's Death of Discworld

So, I've been thinking about death a lot lately...

Seriously, I've been suffering from major depression. Death has been on my mind a lot.  It doesn't help that recently, my favorite author, known for his portrayal of the character of DEATH in his books, Terry Pratchett, died recently. Right around the time Leonard Nemoy died.

Oh, and Christopher Lee, who has played DEATH in the past, died recently too.

I wanted to have his babies. Now I will have to find a different totally awesome, multi-lingual, suave, debonair, elderly genius to father my children.  I'm serious, if you know anyone, I'm not interested in doing it the traditional way at all. I just think it would be awesome to have children with that much potential to be awesome old people.

Back to the topic...

Azrael, the Angel of Death

I've been thinking about Death.

Not just death as in, what happens when you stop living, but death as a concept, personification, god, experience, and so on. People deal with death in so many ways and yet they don't deal with death at all at times. As a culture, we've avoided death to the point that now there's a bunch of books out there where the ideal romance ends in two happy people who are young and in love forever and ever and they'll never ever ever die. *cough*Twilight*cough*

But, for all of our avoidance of death, it's there. All the time. Lurking.

Hel, Norse Goddess of the Underworld

Then again, I've had more or less and obsession with death since I was a teenager and I went through a brief Gothic phase that led to me trying to become a funeral director as an adult.

It didn't end well.

Probably because I take death and I see the positives to it a lot more than the negatives. It's really a huge problem for me especially now and my mom is going to read this and probably have a heart attack. Sorry, Mom.

Hades, Greek God of the Underworld

Anyhow, I see the positives of death. You see, without death, there can't be life. And it's not just because everything has to end. Because, everything doesn't really have to end. The universe is endless. Humans just don't really have a genuine concept for something that doesn't end. Well, we do, but at the same time that concept is imperfect and impractical in this universe where time and entropy exist. If humans didn't die, Earth would be in a lot worse shape than it is now due to overpopulation. Without death, we'd breed ourselves into extinction because there'd be no food to sustain us so we'd have to resort to cannibalism and that's frowned upon in most societies.... also, if we killed all the plants in our search for food before cannibalism became the norm, we'd run out of oxygen first.



So, death is important to life as we know it.

Thanatos, Greek God of Death

It also haunts life. Everyone is afraid of death because though we don't have a good concept of immortality, the concept of ending is equally difficult for us to swallow. We see people ending all around us. Our pets stop existing and they end, but as far as our consciousness is concerned, we've always been. For us to stop being is just... unthinkable and terrifying. Nobody actually wants to die.

Well, okay, some people do want to die, but that's more because the current existence feels untenable for some reason or another. It's not about the dying in and of itself, but about getting out of the current state of affairs whether it's dying in a horrible and painful way or dealing with one's personal demons for one more soul-crushing day.

Neil Gaimen's Death

Death is interesting because humans have turned the concept into so much. There's the anthropomorphic personifaction in the form of the grim reaper or Neil Gaimen's Death, and then there's Death in the form of the journey to the underworld or the underworld itself. And oddly enough, usually Death the grim reaper is not the Lord of the Dead in the underworld. For example, the Greeks had Hades as the Lord of the Underworld (also called Hades), but Thanatos was the God of Death. Osiris is the Lord of the Dead in Ancient Egypt, but Anubis is the God of Death. I always thought that was weird when I was younger that the dead themselves got a god and the underworld also got a god who ruled over the dead as well.

Anubis, Egyptian God of Death

It just seemed odd to me that the Greeks and Egyptians felt the need to differentiate between a god over the dead themselves and a god over the place where the dead went after they die, but then Christians mimicked it in a way with Satan, Hell, Saint Peter, Heaven, and Azrael, the Angel of Death.

That's the thing that fascinated me more than all the death gods, though. What happened after we died? Is it like the Christian tradition I was raised in with Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory as the options? Or is it like the Eastern Religions where you are reincarnated? Or do you go to some dreary underworld similar to our world like in the Greek, Roman, and Norse traditions? Or is it like the Egyptian tradition where you get a shot at paradise after a three thousand year journey, but only if your heart weighs less than a feather?

To me, death sounded sort of like a chance at an adventure. In a world where fantasy is just what you can come up with in your imagination and it will never go farther than that, the idea of death being a portal to another world seemed attractive to me. It still seems attractive to me.

Osiris, Egyptian God fo the Underworld

Of course, that's my problem now. I have something that's really bad for me to idealize and I idealize it to the point of wanting it, scaring the ever-living hell out of everyone I know. I just have to remember that there is so much to live for and so much of an adventure to life that I haven't experienced yet. I'm just not sure if I'm strong enough to experience it.