Death and Dying
© Tom Ebacher

Since we have been people, we have been saying goodbye to our dead.  There aren't many sadder times in a people's lives. As long as we, as a people remember, we have tried to deny death.

Early graves from our prehistory were pits that held the remains of the dead, personal possessions and have shown evidence that flowers were also placed in the grave.  Even then we had ceremony.  In those times, it might have started out as a kindness. Maybe saying something like - "Your father isn't dead.  Just gone away to the land of our ancestors." Harmless words to ease the pain of a child. It is a shame that you can't also say to the child, that I am just making this up so you don't feel so bad.  Those kinds of words don't work if you explain the truth. As the children grew and questioned the myth these harmless words grew more elaborate.   It was in those early times that our people midwifed the birth of religion.

Through the millennia, witch doctors, Shaman and priests performed their ceremonies, memorializing our honored fallen brethren as we placed them in pits and pyres or pyramids. Those simple harmless words kept growing, taking on a life of their own. Hades, purgatory, heaven, paradise, Styx, Jesus, Osiris, Odin, Thor, Mithra, Zeus, Ra and so many other gods and myths paraded before us.

There have been Believers in all ages. . Mostly we prayed to our gods. Sometimes, harmless words entwined with our fears and became horrors as we have traveled our road through history.  We've tried to appease our gods by offering sacrifices from our flocks or offering the lives of our enemies and sometimes even our children. These sacrifices aren't just history, our kind intentions of easing a child's suffering still sometimes get lost in the madness of Fatwas, female genital mutilation, jihads, wars in Algeria, Bosnia, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland and our own Inquisition. Religion's bloody history continues.

But this is only one of the ways that we have denied death.

For all of history we have also denied death by learning.  Learning to heal ourselves of our illnesses and injuries. Learning what food we could pluck from the tree or pull from the earth. Learning to protect ourselves from the elements in caves, huts, or homes. Learning the skills to make weapons that would take down the largest and most dangerous of prey to feed our nomadic tribes. Learning the secrets of agriculture and animal husbandry to feed our numbers as they settled in permanent locations. Finding, at times, that our greatest enemy was ourselves, we learned to raise armies and built walls around us that we thought could not be breached. We've made the most fearsome weapons.

Science and religion both have their curses.

We use both these strategies to deny this terrible tyrant.  One strategy eases our fears but it is only our knowledge that has denied by postponement this dreaded knock on our door. Each time death visits, it hurts.  It means the loss of our lives and our possessions.  It is the loss of companionship.  It is the loss of our plans and our dreams. It is unmet goals.  It is the loss of opportunities to be joyful.

Have you been watching our science?  Do you know what it is learning?  We are on the edge of such powerful knowledge. Denying death is a noble goal. It is a goal as long as history.  It is one of the things that makes us human.

If you are afraid you can still choose religion.  It offers some solace.  But that still leaves this gaping hole before us.