I was thinking about how death is usually viewed as a bad thing.
In its proper context death is a most natural thing, the necessary final phase of any creature’s existence. Every biology textbook and encyclopaedia has little diagrams showing the life cycles of animals and plants which we view quite unemotionally from an early age.
It’s so easy to ascribe good or bad, right or wrong qualities to natural events like death or the weather, which when considered logically need no emotional tags, positive or negative. As the saying goes, “There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing!” So perhaps, viewed dispassionately, could death be considered as neither bad nor good but appropriate or inappropriate depending on the circumstances?
In the case of an elderly person who is terminally ill and enduring a lot of pain and suffering it seems the most appropriate and the kindest thing to assist their death so that they may depart with some dignity. Euthanasia for humans has yet to be accepted legally in this part of the world although we don’t allow our beloved pet cats and dogs to undergo unnecessary suffering. In the case of a suicide victim, death is his or her appropriate choice even though the coroner may rule: “While the balance of the mind was disturbed.” Was it? Perhaps, perhaps not – it really is impossible to say. But in the case of young people who die before they’ve had a chance to fully experience life, like those five poor girls who died in the school bus crash near Navan, death certainly seems inappropriate.
The fact is that when we consider the human condition in which we are all involved, death takes on a much more complex aspect and words like appropriate and inappropriate, logical and illogical, good and bad, right and wrong fall so very far short and are themselves inappropriate.
Mr. Spock the character in “Star Trek” who was only half human used to raise a quizzical eyebrow at the actions of his fellow crew members when they were moved emotionally and described their joy or anguish as illogical. But for us to remain logical and completely unmoved by the vagaries of life seems at the best stoical (which some would construe as callous) and at the worst psychopathic!
I think that the truth might be that death is not a bad thing in itself, but because of our very humanity it seems impossible to remain emotionally uninvolved with death. To remain emotionally uninvolved with death is to be emotionally uninvolved with life and this is inhuman.
“And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”