/karen/

Death comes unexpectedly

Wednesday, 15 June, 2005

(Observant literary nerds like me will note that today's title comes from Pollyanna.)

My CHN post hasn't gone up—I suspect it's been vetoed but you don't really get any feedback about that sort of stuff. Anyways, because I spent a good hour on it, I thought I'd put it up here:

Lately I've been thinking about death. Specifically, about the way that the world thinks about death.

Tradition and folklore have passed down to us the image of the Grim Reaper—a man (or a skeleton) in a black hooded robe who carries a scythe and pops up unexpectedly at dinner parties à lá Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, “reaping” human mortality like grain (have a look at these cartoons).

Playing around with this idea, in the Discworld series, Terry Pratchett's Death is a Death who is a seven-foot skeleton in a black cowled robe who also carries a scythe. (Once Death decided to go on holiday; he was replaced by a combine harvester.) Death likes curry, is fascinated by humans, rides a horse named Binky and talks like this. Despite the nasty things that are said about him, Death is not cruel; he's just “terribly, terribly good at his job”. There is even a suggestion that he is “on our side”. (See here for more information about the Discworld Death.)

It is natural, then, that Neil Gaiman, in his epic comic series, The Sandman, should take the personification of Death one step further. His Death is a pretty young-looking woman who dresses like a Goth, with a silver ankh around her neck (and sometimes with a top hat on her head), who keeps goldfish (Slim and Wandsworth), loves hot dogs and quoting Mary Poppins. Death is the second-oldest of the Endless siblings. She loves all people and comes to greet them when they die. She also speaks to them when they're born but of course they don't remember. Once every hundred years, Death must take human form and walk the earth for a day to “better understand those to whom she will be the final visitor”. (See here for more information about The Sandman's Death.)

The world likes to humanise death. Death, they say, is nothing to be afraid of. Death is a natural part of life. Would you be scared of meeting death if you knew that the one who comes to take your life actually quite likes you? Wouldn't death be alright if a cute Gothic chick who dresses like a rock star came to escort you into the next realm?

But death, for all its “natural-ness”, is profoundly unnatural and wrong. Even though we know that 100% of all people will die someday, death is still shocking, unexpected and sad.

Unlike the world, the Bible says that death is not our friend. It doesn't look like us, it doesn't act like us, it doesn't like the things that we like and it certainly doesn't love us. It is our enemy. It is our enemy because it is an enemy of God (1 Corinthians 15:26).

One day our enemy will be defeated:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

(1 Corinthians 15:54-55)

How do you think about death?

Twitter

Blinks:

Feeds

• Full posts
• Full posts and del.icio.us feed
• Excerpts only
• del.icio.us feed only
• All comments

Social media

• Flickr
• Goodreads
• Last FM
• LibraryThing
• Listal
• Pinterest
• Ravelry
• This Is My Jam
• Twitter