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Shuffling Towards Death
Choosing our Path On a Universal Journey
From the moment we are born, we shuffle towards death.
Sometimes infants die, and we count it a tragedy, thinking of all the lost potential. Would this child have found the cure for cancer? Would this one have been generous to the poor? We think of the broken hearts of the bereaving family, the empty cradle, the clothes that won’t be worn.
We never think — this one would have grown up to be an alcoholic, a criminal, a predator. But those potentials are also there.
With older children, the tragedy can be even deeper, perhaps?
The parents know the child. They are attached. An infant death brings deep pain, but when a child is older and the smile and the laughter and the tears and the sleepless nights and the small victories… all of this become part of the soul of the family.
Yet if we survive all that, we are still on the same route as always.
In most modern countries it is no longer considered remarkable for young adults or even the middle aged to survive and continue their shuffle towards death.
And at some point people start talking about the “good death”. They refer to older people when they say this. Someone elderly who dies in their sleep and how…
