Let’s Talk About Death
Death. Dead. Dying. Death is such an integral part of everyone’s journey, we all have it in common. Our current science says roughly 50-70 billion cells die a day in our body. 50 to 70 BILLION WHAT THE BLIP?? Not to mention, the things we eat need to die and break down in our digestive systems.
In our human history, cultures around the world would sacrifice and kill people for a multitude of reasons such as to honour the gods, to make an offering for a good harvest or prevent natural disasters. We have killed each other in wars, over family feuds, religion, even to claim wealth. Death is no stranger to our door.
I remember as a kid living on a boat in the Torres Strait Islands spearing squid and eating it for dinner that night. There was a whole process to killing an animal, taking another’s life and it had a purpose, it had responsibility to it. It was something as a kid I was very in touch with and close to intuitively. You don’t kill more than you need and you respect the cycles of when to kill and when to leave things be. These days I am less in touch with that, if I had to kill all the things I eat in a week, I would not be eating nearly as much food, why? Because it would take a lot of work. Now a lot of society is far removed from the killing process and it is done elsewhere on a mass scale.
It is interesting to notice. You go about your life and suddenly someone close to you dies, then you are faced again with death and your relationship to it. You get older and your parents die or sometimes nyou outlive your kids, there is no set rules. Is death a celebration of life? Is it mourning and grieving? Is it the end of life as we know it? One thing is for sure, you don’t take your money, your possession, your achievements or your body with you when you transition.
If you have ever looked at a dead body, there is something so strange about it. It is familiar yet foreign, the soul, the spirit, the spark of life energy that was fueling the intelligence that beats your heart, is gone. Hmm where did it go? What of it now? The body will decompose, organs may be donated for research, hopefully some animals get to feast on the body as it returns back to the cycle of life or it gets placed in a coffin and rots away like kombucha fermenting, prolonging the decomposing of it dramatically. I marvel at the rain forest when I walk through Buderim Falls, all the palm leaves on the ground that fall away from the tree. They remain on the ground slowly decomposing as they provide so much for flora and fauna on the ground. Hmm so death is linked to life.
Can you imagine if we never died?
What would life be then? It’s interesting, I’m sure at some point we will crack the code to some level of biological immortality. What happens to the person we knew after they have died? Do they go to heaven or hell? Do they get to go through a life review in a cinema ? Are they reincarnated? Do they realise they are a part of everything? Do they hover over their body and go SHIT that was me. Do they get time travel? Space travel? Do they haunt someone as a ghost? Is it just nothing and it’s all a black oblivion? How exciting, all these possibilities that could be after death. Perhaps life truly begins after death hahaha.
