Letters to God – Part 20: On Death and Life


Today someone died.

That should not surprise us, right God? There are billions of people in the world, millions in my country. Millions of people die every day. Nonetheless, death is something that still bothers us. We fear death. We hate death. But why?

The other day I took some time to think about this. Why don’t we live forever? How would the world look if we never died? The first image that came to my mind is that we would all be sitting in the beach, drinking coconut water and eating fish we took from the sea. All urgent things in life would disappear, because there would always be tomorrow.

But at the same time, this would create great stagnation of the human race. Why? Because if we had infinite time to do things, we would also take infinite time to do them. That is how we are. I don’t meant there would be no inventions, but the process would be much, much slower. I can imagine the typical conversation between two inventors/entrepreneurs in this world: “Jill: Bad news Joe – the test we did today for the itch-scratchy machine failed again. Joe: Bugger. Well, we’ll try again later. No rush, it’s not like we are going to die tomorrow or something like that”.

For some strange inner reason, we all want to change the world. We have a limited number of years, days, hours… And one day, hopefully without previous notice, we die. So we can’t wait for tomorrow, because who knows what will happen tomorrow. We must do things now.

My greatest fear is not death, God. Everything ends when we die. I fear for the living, because these are the ones who suffer when we go. I fear pain. I fear suffering. I fear being lonely.

But I don’t fear death. Because death is what makes me alive.