Obsessing With Dying.

Everywhere I look there is death. Television, games, books, music and most importantly our everyday lives as if experiencing it first-hand isn’t enough. It’s almost like we crave it; we want to fill our lives with death until imaginary dead bodies are piling the streets of our minds.

We want to see dead bodies overflowing from our screens and pages and speakers. We want to drown in cold blue skin and choke on the stench of rotting. It’s death for goodness sakes! Death! Why are we so obsessed with it?

Through every possible medium we experience it. Murder mysteries, gangster style rap, first person shooters and of course our pets, grandparents and more for the unlucky amongst us. Why don’t we focus on the important things like, oh, I don’t know… Living? Breathing? Waking up? Seeing the sun just to feel alive?

I’m not going to lie to anyone. I can count the video games that I’ve played which don’t involve death on one hand and a mysterious or untimely death can be the best scenes when it comes to the big screens. Maybe it’s because… Well, what am I supposed to say? Maybe it’s because I enjoy those games, those films, those books and those songs? Maybe it’s because what else is there to glorify? Maybe because both.

We will all come to expire, all of us. Any single person in the whole of humanity who draws breath will not always have the privilege of life. For that reason shouldn’t we find something else to obsess over? There is enough death already.
We all think of cancer patients or terminally ill people as dying. We see the incurables and we say “They’re dying.” And while that is true who is to say it isn’t true for each and every one of us? The truth is we are all dying. With each minute that passes we come closer to our inevitable death.

I say we start living while we die. Forget about death, it’s no more than a living process that we each go through. Like a twenty-first birthday, a wedding, or even your first day of school. Let’s stop making living about dying; instead we should make it about feeling alive.