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Death
Boy, we don't like to use that word. We have all kinds of euphemisms we use for dying: passed on, passed, passed away, beyond the bar, succumbed, deceased, and expired are just a few. One of the things now written on a person's chart among health care professionals is "negative patient care outcome."
All of these things mean the same thing: you died.
We can't imagine being dead because we've never been dead before. If we were born in 1965, we don't have any recollection at all of what happened in 1964. We only know what we know. We only know what we've experienced since we've been alive.
Even those people of faith aren't sure. We say we are and believe we are but when it comes time to die, we're just as distraught as those with no faith. You would think that the rewards promised us that includes streets paved with gold in a place where there's never any pain, injury, sickness or death and to be reunited with those people that meant the most to us for all eternity would be an incentive to die but it's not. We don't want to die anymore than anyone else does. Some believe that religion and its promise of everlasting life was created because we're so afraid to die.
So we build great monuments to revere the dead; headstones and cemetery plots and grand funerals. We buy expensive caskets and burial clothes to disguise our guilt for perhaps loving them more in death than we did in life. And every Memorial Day, and often many times before and after that, we go and pay respect to our dead. We take flowers and we tend their graves and we talk and pray over corpses six feet under ground that can't hear anything we say or do because we hope that's what people will do for us after we die too.
This is all understandable I suppose because no one has ever reported back from the other side. Those people whose religion tells them that there's life after death hope and pray that's true but they don't really know and so when they lose someone dear to them, they feel a sense of loss every bit as much as those who have no faith at all.
That's because the unknown is the unknown. We think we know. We want to know. We tell everyone we do know but we don't know.
We can't imagine being dead because we've always been alive. And the fear of the unknown (death) is what causes some people to do really remarkable things when they're alive.
We outlaw smoking because we don't want to die. We create wellness plans and ban trans fat because we don't want to die. We exercise, walk, jog, or run because we don't want to die. We mandate seat belts and motorcycle helmets because we don't want to die. We eat healthy because we don't want to die. We pray for people to live, never to die.
And then we die anyway.