In Defense of Death

Quite literally. 

This is most recognizably a piece of procrastination artwork. 

It all started while I was reviewing my ethics notes on the subject of cloning...

It seems that some people want to use cloning as a way to defeat aging and to gain immortality. 

C'mon humanity!

Part of what defines us as human beings is the fact that we die. This is a good thing. We need a healthy relationship with death. Alas, our Enlightenment movement away from the mystery in our lives has caught us in a net of fear of dying. We are both fascinated by death, as portrayed by our television shows and our movies. Yet, we shun the idea of death in our own lives, believing that it will not come to us, that it will quietly pass us by as simply as we fail to acknowledge death in our language of people passing away...

Death brings us a lot of pain and sorrow. Death brings us face to face with our experience of time. We would not be so worried about time if we weren't so busy trying to cram everything in before we die. But death also allows us to acknowledge how much we love someone by how much we miss them when they are not in our lives anymore. Death clears space in our lives for new things. We would not get spring without death. We would not get new friendships without death. (By estimate of William Least Heat Moon, a human being meets another 100,000 human beings in their life. How could we keep track of all those human beings if we didn't experience some kind of death in relationships?) each day we shed almost a million dead cells making way for new, energized, cells keeping our lives going. Death keeps our love and laughter in perspective. 

Plenty of novels have been written where immortal characters wish for the change of death, the release, the relief. Plenty of novels have explored the possibility of a culture of immortal beings. The ones I have read seem to show that in such a situation, culture stagnates. Those beings lose any sense of urgency which would motivate them to change. Death rejuvenates us. 

Without death, as a Christian, I have no hope of being united with God. I do not long for death, but I do want to have a healthy appreciation for what it has done for me and this world. 

Without death, we could not be part of the circle of life.