Death

Someone once told me that death is the biggest reality of life. Although this statement had all the hallmarks of depth and wisdom, I don’t agree.

I have several problems with that statement actually.

To begin with, death is not really a reality. A reality is something that has a definite, quantitative value. Yet death is far from that. We view death as the end of life, but there is much we ignore if we stick to this narrow view.

For starters, there are many people who are very much alive physically yet dead emotionally or spiritually. Do you call them alive or dead? Have you ever heard someone say they feel "dead inside"? How do you qualify those?

Then there is the fact that death sometimes heralds the start of things. Where one story ends, another story begins. As a man dies somewhere in the world, the cries of a newborn will ring somewhere else. Sometimes the death of a loved one can shock relatives who have never talked – or people who hated each other – into giving their relationships another chance. Is this death – or is it life?

The second problem I have is the fact that – for some weird reason – we always associate death with life. How can death be the biggest reality of life when the truth is, it is a way of making life cease to have any meaning to most people.

Death is just death. It cannot be quantified but neither can it be seen in relation to life. The biggest reality in life is life itself. The moment of death is irrelevant. It only matters what we did in the years of life we had before death stepped in the picture. It only matters if we made the best of life.

Death is a fleeting moment. A vivid vision that quickly fades away. But life lives on forever. It is the lives of great people that are remembered, not their deaths. That is their greatest reality. Beethoven created some of the best classic music in history even though he was nearly deaf. That is his life – that is his reality.

Shakespeare was the biggest playwright the world has ever seen. The plays that he wrote are his biggest reality as they play out every day all over the world. His death is insignificant. A fleeting moment.

And it was Shakespeare who, in understanding this reality, wrote the best description of death ever conceived. In the final chapter of his play Julius Caesar, he explains it in the simplest of manners – yet the most descriptive of manners.

He simply says "And he died."

That's it.

No splendor, no glory.

The most beautiful description of death ever wrote.