Life and death

Tema	Anglų kalba
Tipas	Topikas
Aprašymas	You come to this world, you live your life and you finally die. That is a very simplified structure of person’s existence (at least the one that is observable). There are very little unsolved questions about the birth of the child, about his living. Willing to know everything about it lots of researches were done.
Patalpinta	2005-05-09
Parsisiuntė	409
	Parsisiųsti6 KB

Išsamus aprašymas

Though less is known about death. All we know is that the body stops functioning. And no one knows what comes after that, what happens with person’s mind and spirit. Or maybe nothing happens, human existence just ends at the moment of death. So far it is everyone’s business to believe in life after death or not. But there is one question that can be discussed about death: is it meaningful or not? One can say that the one who believes in life after death will give the meaning to it and on the contrary – the one who does not – will not give the meaning to it. But there are people who do not believe in life after death. They even do not know if they believe in something at all and death is something mysterious, something important in human’s life even for them.
Why death is so important in human’s life? Is it important? Before answering these questions I checked in the Internet hoping to find something about death. I looked for information in Academic Search Elite and Academic Search Premier databases and found over 20.000 pages related to this theme. Of course, not all of them were only about death itself, some of them where about death of some famous person, but the numbers speak. People talk about it, and if they talk about it – they care about it, it is important for them.
However, why others think that it is just “an awful, stinking, absurd horror, and there is no way of giving it meaning”? There may be a lot of reasons and I would like to mention some of them. Let us look at the world history and especially the World War I, World War II and other tragedies. Dead people were buried all together without coffins, without priests (if a man was religious), without any attention. Of course, there were such circumstances – economic situation was bad, no time for normal funeral (have to fight), lots of unknown dead people. The death lost it’s mysteriousness, sacral meaning. Therefore some people think of death if it was only the end of bodies functioning.
Though no man can judge them because no-one knows if there is something after death. Everyone knows for sure that the body begins to fall to pieces, begins to putrefy, to stink after death. This is also a reason to think as Rollo May does. But we should think from the other point of view. Every man’s death makes his relatives, friends, acquaintances feel bad, sad, or at least uncomfortable. Some of them say that they miss the person, feel lonely without him. Maybe it can be called egoism, but still person’s death does not pass through without consequences. It makes us stop for a second and think about the eternal questions of life and death.
Yet another reason for such thinking could be the fear of death. When people are afraid of something they usually ignore or deny it. Some of them do not even think about it. In this situation a person who thinks so do not want to have any relationships with death and therefore deny it, give no meaning to it. And as the folk wisdom speaks – the roots of fear hide in ignorance.
The meaning of death also shows burying traditions. Our ancients showed respect to a dead man by putting expensive clothes, things, animals and even humans to graves. They believed in life after death and emphasized it with great ceremonies. When Catholicism came to our culture burying traditions have changed but nevertheless it remained very important in humans’ life cycle. It proves the importance of priest’s participation in funeral. I have already mentioned World Wars. As it is the tragedy of the whole mankind, we can not judge about significance of death from this point of view. Nowadays things change very fast and it is hard to decide how people think about things. By the way Andrew Greeley said: “since the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe there has been a significant increase in religious faith in Hungary, Slovenia, East Germany, and the Soviet Union, particularly in matters of religious faith like belief in God, life after death, heaven, hell, and religious miracles.” (Society, Mar/Apr2001, Vol. 38 Issue 3, p32, 6p). Proving this I should say I was surprised one day by the Mass in the Catholic Church – there were lots of young people, they were singing, it looked as if they liked it very much to be in church, to participate in Mass. It was no doubt for me that they really believe in God who says that death is an important period in human’s existence.
But there is another question about believing in God and meaningful death. It happens very often that a man who lost his friend, beloved person in early childhood when his faith in something was just beginning to develop does not believe in God, hates death because of some unfairness, offense. He can not go to a funeral, he laughs at those who suffer because of somebody’s death. He says he does not understand people who give some meaning to death. But it is just a defensive reaction. He denies death because he does not want to remember early childhood’s horrible experience.
Lately I have been to a couple of funerals. People who died were not very close to me. Still their death touched me. As I looked at dead people’s relatives, friends I realized that this event is very hard to experience. It seemed that they lost the ground under their feet, they looked so lost as if they did not know how they were going to live any longer. But still in such a sad situation they believed that for a man who died will be easier to live “there”. They wanted to say goodbye to their friend, relative and I even heard one woman saying that she hopes to see him in the better world. That was the most convincing argument that she believes in the meaning of death. I would like to say that nobody should give up in believing in life after death. People should believe in death as in a one step in the better human’s life. In nowadays when social, economic conditions are very unfavorable old people who have to little time to change something must have hope in case they could live their last days cheerfully, hopefully. But it is one problem with it – people are too afraid in death. Let us cope with this problem, let us give a hopeful meaning to death and let us live more joyful!

Raktiniai žodžiai

• life of a famous person
• how a person feel when think in death
• no one knows for sure if their life and death