Death is a distant rumor to the young. ~Andrew A. Rooney
To me this could not be further from the truth. As a child my perception of death was very real. Though I can't say I lived a life surrounded by gore for I've never saw anyone die and only the occasional elder relative would pass in those days, I can say that my realization of death came way before my youth had reached it's peak.
Chicken Run. You know the folk tale where Newton saw the apple fall from the tree and stumbled upon gravity? Well Chicken Run was my apple, and death was my gravity. Now this movie is by no means deep, or even focused on death, but one scene flipped my life upside down one night at the tender age of 8. As the protagonist chicken (I'm at a loss for names at the moment) creeps upon a roof he sees the shadow of another chicken against a wall, a cleaver is raised, and the chicken is beheaded. As though a great fog had been lifted from my third eye, I suddenly realized death. At that very moment I perceived that humans live to die. There is no avoiding it. We came from the Earth and we will return to it. Words can not describe the cruel joke that this system plays on us. After this scene was over I though about waking my father but I've always been a bit introspective and never really one to complain or look for help if I myself couldn't provide it. My stomach felt as though I was permanently falling down a steep roller coaster. I remember crying. I remember nights where once again alone in my bed the thought of death would hit me and I was powerless to suppress it. That gut feeling would resume; I would cried once more. This comes with youth. As I got older and life became more hectic I had no more time to sit alone and watch Chicken Run or be a victim to my thoughts. Some nights, and sometimes mid day even, the blunt truth still creeps in on my mind and the only answer is to be ignorant. Ignorance is bliss.
If death is a joke, then as Peter Nelson would say, our lives are the punchlines. Now I can not say that I laugh in the face of death, but I can say I've just recently learned to giggle behind it's back. Why fear death when it's inevitable. If you fear the sun rise then every morning you surely will be disappointed and filled with horror. Your life lasts longer than one night, and death is much shorter than a sun rise. The average human will live to be around 70 years old. When we take into account that only 400 years, or 5.7 human life spans ago society still hung people for accusations of witchcraft (the stuff that Harry Potter does) 70 years seems much longer. The tisi fly has only 24 hours to live it’s life, in comparison humans seem almost greedy for living so long. Just recently a professor at my school told me that if scientists can find a way to control where golgi bodies are transported to in our anatomy humans could live well into the mid hundreds. Once afraid of death as a child I am now proud to say I’ve accepted it.
I got bored and will probably rewrite the underlined part about death at a later date.