Our Excruciating Modernity

On Death

Man celebrates life, so let him celebrate Death.

In Death, there is immense solace to be found, but as a society, we have failed at recognising this essential revelation. Death is truth, evolution and movement; it is replacement and opportunity, it is renewal and metamorphosis, it is the initial and only ingredient that is wholly necessary to the concoction of anything. We have chosen to make Death a consuming confrontation, an obliterating encounter, an inevitable Evil, but Man has the power to fundamentally shift his unaccepting take on Death.

We don't die well enough.

I picture a fertile garden, a retreat for the soon departing soul of the Dying. This is a fantastical metaphor but it illustrates the vision I have for the voyage to Death and what it should, in essence, be. An ideal Death should not be tarnished by rampant grief, regret or remorse, for there is no purpose in tearing up for, or because of, the unavoidable, or in fearing a state one will never experience. Rather, it shall be a phenomenal celebration, tactile to the soul, which fills and fulfils the Dying and the crevices of their being, which are the marks of having once been. Permanent departure should become, in our homes and hospitals, a sensorial final send-off in which the flasks containing the distilled elixir of human life are shattered to allow the sweet scents of Art, embrace and celebration to waft, unfettered in Air, heightening the senses and embalming the dying. Indeed, he who is dying does not deserve the widespread spiritual sterility that is the norm for institutions in which human death is omnipresent. No, it is bursts of pigment, purity and serenity aimed directly at the spirit, not the corpse, that should be the new normal.

Thank you very much, and au revoir, for we will meet again. When we do, I hope we shall, I hope, have attempted to rid ourselves from the ills of Modernity and the meaninglessness, indifference and mindlessness it instills in Man, and will have cultivated our living spirit in order to become lesser evils for ourselves, and consequently, for those we love and cherish.

Look up to the sky, and it might just look back.

- Thomas Beaudet