The Last Handiwork

Nobody starts a sentence without knowing how to end it — with a period or full stop. How come we live our lives — many of us are now living seventy or eighty years — without a thought about the end point, our death.

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For most of us, death is at best an ominous shadow, a haunting menace, to which we close our eyes until it drops like an inexorable guillotine. Until that dismal moment, we can disregard it as a foreseen but unwelcome event that is best not contemplated.

The scriptures foisted on us from childhood are of scant help. These talk essentially of remote, hardly credible prospects we instinctively cast aside as folkloric and irrelevant. Maybe there are regions in the clouds called paradise and below the earth called inferno, but their very descriptions carry little credence with a modern mind. We are left with little to envision except a cataclysmic end followed by an indefinite sojourn in an indefinable land. Our adult minds have little to ponder on except an undefined, undefinable event, death, and a sequel quite unknown, with few indications as to what it may entail.

This accounts for the reluctance of most minds to focus on death. Except in those rare moments when we are forced to think of it because of a deceased friend or a relative. After some rituals, which are public and quasi-mechanical, and some private grieving, often extenuated these days by companions and therapists, we return quickly to our usual life. We are back in the accustomed stream of life without any significant preoccupation with the phenomenon of death. Death remains a strange and stranger event.