So you know that even if the manner of your death is arbitrary, your mortality is inescapable?

 

Depressing?  Maybe the interahamwe will get you, maybe you'll die in the next civil war with the EZLN, maybe you'll be hit by a car, maybe you'll get cancer, maybe you'll be executed in China or Texas.

Maybe you'll have cardiac arrest, your brain will get a tumour, your feet will fail, your lungs will stop and your heart will end.  Perhaps Hamas will kill you, perhaps Hezbollah.  Maybe you'll linger like Gilad Shalit, maybe you won't.  Your parents will die, your lover, your sister, brother, friend, the girl across the street, your dog, the insignificant ants we step on... everything.  We're tied to all organisms because inspite of it all, we all have the same fate.

It's black - your future is black.  What is there beyond death but infinite nothingness.  Do you believe in a soul?  In an omniscient God?  An all knowing, loving, compassionate, caring, protective God?  An Abrahamic God?  A Hindu God?  Your own God?

You're going to die, I'm going to die, we're all going to die.  Our descendants won't remember us (what's your paternal great, great grandmothers name?)

And what then?  People say death is the next step, but they're wrong.  Death is the end - your body will rot, the eyes that read this will end, the hands that type this will fail, one day I'll be old.  My body will end, hands, feet, liver, kidney, lungs... all decrepid.  All finite.

All we have to remind you of ourselves is the tangible things we leave you.

Shakespeare had it:

Or I shall live your epitaph to make,

Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;

From hence your memory death cannot take,

Although in me each part will be forgotten.

Your name from hence immortal life shall have,

Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:

The earth can yield me but a common grave,

When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,

Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read,

And tongues to be your being shall rehearse

When all the breathers of this world are dead;

You still shall live--such virtue hath my pen--

Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.