Death is an exclusively individual experience, but the only remains, other than the carcass, are the memories and emotions (or lack thereof) of the people you leave behind.
Along with all this comes their judgement. Unusually cruel, seeing as the recipient of said judgement isn’t present at their own hearing. So is it true? Do we die for others?
In asking that – do we die for others? – I am not asking whether death itself exists for the benefit or detriment of anyone else other than the person who dies (even though this could be argued), but rather is death approached with a greater concern for others rather than the person actually doing the dying?
Once dead we are placed beyond suffering and remorse, beyond gratification or happiness, beyond anything and everything that once made us human and existent. This is debatable, but we are certainly beyond the point where it matters to those left behind. Those dead are dead, and what was once accessible and tangible is gone in the most irrevocable way. Whatever the state of the bereaved, the deceased can no longer be a cause. It is an absence, a non-existent thing, it does not have the privilege of having an effect, only its death has an effect, and in its death it can no longer change, and so unlike a living thing its effect is immutable, unchanging.
It is like the life of the dead becomes fixed. And this more than anything else is what becomes the judgment. In life we can choose to improve, to rectify, to alter our ways and recompense for errors committed. Death revokes all these privileges. God’s judgment becomes a moot point when we consider the judgement of the living.
For what else is a eulogy if not a judgment? The defence and the prosecution giving their summations to the jury. The sentence will always be based on what others have said and remembered of us rather than the life and events that lay as the subject of this judgement.
If we were to think of death while living, constantly and sincerely, we would find it increasingly difficult to live for ourselves, to live without the judgment of that ultimate jury being foremost in our minds.
For some people this is a reality. They see death as a social burden to be carried throughout their lives. What will “they” think of me when I die? How will I be remembered, what would I have left behind? The “me” is extracted in death, purged from life. Death is the ultimate socialiser.
Could this be why death is so prominent in the media? Think of how much content in the media is dedicated to death as civil sacrifice and the final payment of dues. In film, radio, television and print, the great and selfless, the tragic and notorious, get public notices that says as much about the life lost as the death suffered. Think of Saving Private Ryan, those all so touching scenes at the military cemetery (what an oversight on my part for not recalling its name), when a whole family visits the grave of a man who gave himself (and the lives of others) selflessly, when he didn’t have to, but only in death has he become heroic, the visitor almost diminished with his still-being-here.
How ignoble the death that is silent, that is meek and unheralded. How ignoble the death of the life of small stature, of small footprint. Death is not an absolute; it is a variable, changing in nature and size from person to person, life to life.
Make sure you don’t die only for yourself. Don’t be so selfish. Don’t think your life and its termination is only yours. Remember – the death might be yours, but the judgment it allows will always be ours.
The jury awaits.