Is it death that secretly troubles us?
Mistletoe paused in her drawing to contemplate the thought that had suddenly drifted into her mind from the swirling anxieties of her fellow passengers.
Where had the thought come from?
Mistletoe was one of nature’s non-worriers. She was blessed with the gift of travelling through time and life’s disasters with a serenity that astonished those who knew her. She had no philosophy as such. She had no worked-out ideology. And she had none of the overwhelming ambitions that drove people on frantically down life’s narrow roads. She viewed life as a journey, and harboured no thoughts about its end. The journey was all that ever concerned her.
She was born with a happy soul. She had made as many mistakes as most people make in an average life in any of the privileged nations of the earth. Her parents were both still alive and so, without knowing it, she was still dwelling in enchanted time, without the invisible and searing umbilical cord ever having been cut. She was in the blessed zone of her life, and didn’t know it. Still – she had, with tranquillity, been making experimental drawings of the merging scenes that fast travel makes of the world, when the question materialised in her mind. Her drawing was troubled by the question.
Is it death that secretly troubles us? The fear that the marvel of being alive will be no more? That we will no longer breathe, or see the buttercups of May? That we will love no more, no more be loved? That all the sweet things we take so much for granted will be extinguished: the pleasures of reading, the delight of travel, the ecstasies of lovemaking, all the wonderful surprises that life might bring, that all will be as the promise of summer glimpsed in winter, but not lived to be seen? This troubled her.
When all the possibilities of life, when all the failures of a life so far, when all the despair, the fears, the worries, are set against death, how feeble all our fears, worries, and failures seem. The fear of death narrows the perspective of life, narrows it, and makes all of living shrink.
The fear of death makes life not worth living. It makes life a sort of living death. For it gives death such power and such hegemony over every act of living. Fear of death makes death into a tyrant that commands all the laws and routes of living. It makes life surrender to death, to a future death, to a thing that has not yet occurred, and so it abolishes the entire scope and freedom of living while one is alive.