Human beings will do nearly anything to avert their eyes from death; it’s a pathological and universal impulse. You can think about it abstractly and in others, but try to turn your mind to the thought that your body will one day decompose—that your brain, your heart, your skin, your muscles will sprout mold and shrivel up and return to dust—and you will encounter a powerful hesitance.

Nearly 60,000,000 people die every year on planet Earth. This is one of the things that makes human beings so bewildering. I’m not talking about the fact that people die, but the fact that they take so little time to consider death.

Human beings will do nearly anything to avert their eyes from death; it’s a pathological and universal impulse. You can think about it abstractly and in others, but try to turn your mind to the thought that your body will one day decompose—that your brain, your heart, your skin, your muscles will sprout mold and shrivel up and return to dust—and you will encounter a powerful hesitance.

But it remains: our mortal bodies hold onto the flickering heartbeat of life like a spring tulip holds onto its blooms—vanishingly. In the end, all of our efforts to avert our eyes from death will fail. Someday, whether near or far, death will step in front of you and hold your gaze. All your strategies to avoid it and ignore it will fail. It will take you in its teeth and clamp down. You will feel that helplessness common to mortal creatures.

Death may catch up with you as you look down on a hospital bed, clutching a hand that isn’t clutching yours. It might stare back at you in a mirror; you might see it in your own eyes. Maybe it will be the phone ringing with news of a friend and the drunk driver who didn’t stop at the red light.

At that moment you will see what you were trying not to see since your parents first sat you down and told you that grandpa went to heaven. Everything Adam. Everything rotting. Everything bending towards terminal illness and stark hospital beds and intravenous streams of chemicals keeping bodies clinging to life. We’re seeds germinating in cliff cracks; we’re helium in a popped balloon on a breezy day. Death reigns. Corruption is law.

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