"I hope that I get old before I die"

If you can name the 80's alternative band who sings that song, you get extra points for cultural relevance!

Anyway, as if I haven't been discussing heavy enough topics lately, I feel like writing about death today. Fun, huh?

I was thinking about how as you go through life, you have different perspectives on death and it's relation to you personally. I'm sure there's some psychologist who has formulated some theory about this, you know, like Piaget or whoever. But this is my UN-psychological approach.

When you're little, like my kids' ages, you hear of death, and you may actually see it occur in a pet or even a family member, but it is very abstract. You can play-act dying because it doesn't register just what "dead" really means--when you're playing, you just miraculously wake up and are "fixed" again. It's probably pretty easy to accept Jesus' death and resurrection as a child, because death seems like something you can get better from when you're small.

Then you get to be a teenager, and you realize that death is permanent and kind of scary, but as an invincible immortal, you don't believe it can actually happen to you. You may see it happen to your family, or even kids in your school may die. If you look at the reaction of middle or high schoolers when a classmate dies, it's a really big dramatic incident. Even if you didn't know or even like the person who died, it is cause for much weeping and hugging and visiting the school guidance counselor and the writing of really bad poetry. But in spite of this, I think most teens don't really believe death will happen to them, hence the continuation of risky behavior. It doesn't stop kids from drinking or driving too fast, or doing drugs, or whatever.

I'm not sure what happens in the college years. Perhaps it's kind of an extension of the teen years, but as you mature you begin to realize that it's just plain stupid to continue to do things like race your friends down the backside of Greeley hill, or drink and drive, or whatever. Plus if you're in college, or if you're working, you're maybe too busy to think too much about death, and maybe at times death actually seems like a calm and soothing option to the crazy, hectic life you may be living! For some reason much of those years are a blur to me, at least as far as my ideas on death are concerned, so I'm hypothesizing.

Then you get married and have kids, and more and more people in your life start to die, and you start to get grey hair, and your doctor tells you you have kidney disease or high cholesterol, or whatever, and every time you turn on the Today Show or open up a magazine, there's some new horrible disease you could get or some tragic accident to make you feel sick. And because you have a family, the thought of death happening to one of them or even yourself is a great cause of fear in your heart. You can't imagine losing these people who you love SO much, and you're afraid that if you die, you will miss out on so many things in their lives, the idea that life will just go on without you is very painful.

But at the same time, there's something in you that realizes that death doesn't have to be so scary, that at some point, it happens to all of us, and when you see all the pain in this world, you think it might be good to not have to deal with all of that. If you are a believer and have a hope in heaven, then this helps, even though it may sometimes be hard to fathom. On bad days too, you think "perhaps all these nice people would be much better off without my bad attitude and nasty behavior". Or, you think, rather selfishly, "maybe it wouldn't be so bad to miss out on adolescence and all the fun that will bring." Whatever it is, death looks slightly less terrifying on some days.

I imagine (and this could be completely preposterous, as I am merely speculating) that as you get even older, and your body starts to wear down even more, and more and more people around you start to die, that death gets even less scary. I don't know, maybe the closer death gets the more scary it gets, but it seems to me at least that the fear of death is decreasing (sometimes) as I get older. (and wiser?? Nah.)

There are some days when I am "scared to death" of death. Then there are other days when I think, "Ok, God, I'm ok with the knowledge that someday this will all be over." Because I do believe that the other side of life will be better. Aside from not knowing what that other side is really all about, I think the scariest thing about death is how suddenly and unknowingly it occurs. It just will happen, and there is nothing to do about it, and as human beings we wish we could have some sort of say, some sort of control over this totally uncontrollable event. If I could have one wish about my own death it would be just that it wouldn't happen in a scary way, like a plane crash.

Now, lest you think I am some kind of morbid freak, I do not think about death all the time! But having kids and a family makes you ponder your own mortality in a way that I hadn't before, and so it's something I think about. I don't think it's something I dwell on, but I do think about it probably every day in some way. Let's face it, it's all around us and it's going to happen to all of us sometime. But I do "hope that I get old before I die." There's lots of great things I still want to experience in the meantime!