Eulogy for a Friend

Why do we die? This question has haunted me from an early age, around the time of my grandfather’s death. Death had never seemed so real, or impactful, until it hit close to home. There is of course, the scientific explanation: Our bodies give out on us. Age will rip and tear at our carbon vessel until life can no longer be sustained. Maybe a disease was the catalyst in our departure from this world, or maybe some tragic accident mangled our bodies to the point where our essence quickly ebbed away into the unknown terrains of death. Bottom line, we are organic creatures, made of material that wastes away, corroding into nothingness.

This leads us to another question: Is death merely a passage to some sort of afterlife? The faithful across the board speak of “God’s plan.” Our deaths are caused by a higher purpose and our reward for being good or our punishment for being evil awaits us on the other side of the chasm. We die because God in his, or her, great wisdom has a better design for the human condition.

To look at this question from a purely emotional angle, we must consider the trauma caused by immortality and why this makes living forever unpractical. If the entire population were immortal, then life would become a monotonous routine, a maze with no exits. None would find rest from the endless grind of the day-to-day. Now, if only some people were immortal and not all, then these poor souls would have to live while their loved ones passed on, assuming of course a deep emotional attachment to family and friends. Either scenario causes emotional trauma for the immortal population, making immortality unpractical.

From an environmentalist standpoint, an immortal population would waste resources at an alarming rate, causing the simultaneous death of every other species and the environment. If we were, in fact, immortal, starvation with no death in sight proves to be an unpleasant prospect. The inclusion of death as a part of life ensures the maintenance of resource usage at a moderate rate, ensuring a longer life span for the human species. It could be said that death brings life to our children and so on and so forth.

The reasons as to why we die are many. There are countless theories and hypotheses created to explain this phenomenon. Perhaps all of them are correct, perhaps none are. The only clear conclusion to be had from all this pondering is that death is an inevitable part of life and that it will be continued to be studied and explained for as long as reason and man live as one.