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There’s one universal constant that we tend to ignore. Our ego-driven minds were not built to understand it — rather, simply cope with it. Coming face to face with our own impermanence is terrifying. While so many people live in the future, always looking forward to what’s next, we ignore the only guarantee that will meet us: death.
I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently. As my friends and I get older, it’s been a trend in the past year for our grandparents to pass away. For something so final and important, I find it strange how I can quickly gloss over each passing and focus on the trivialities of life. It’s remarkably easy to forget (or ignore) the impending period at the end of our lives. You would think that the reality of a final day would cause us humans to rush to accomplish our wildest dreams, checking off bucket-list items. But, it doesn’t. We don’t think about it, and we move on.
I revisited my old book notes on The Death of Ivan Illych by Leo Tolstoy. After reading the novella for a second time, I was content with the idea that the best way to live one’s life is to both follow your own path while also seeking to help those around you. It’s one of those messages that sounds nice on paper but is almost impossible to actually incorporate into my own life. It’s so vague as to be banal. So, I haven’t really been satisfied. I was left wondering what death could teach us and why it mattered, anyway.
I turned back to books for an answer. I picked up Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man at a…
