Some professions cater to the bringers of violent death. Others cater to the notion of death being a mercy. The profession of nurses, on the other hand, contains a frighteningly wide spectrum of attitudes toward death. Some try to fight it. Others make it bearable. Some troubled few actively hasten it, and others cause it.
Some professions exist in denial of the notion of permanent death, such as, perhaps, religious orders and maybe certain aspects of the military. The paranormal community seems to in general possess an underpinning need for confirmation of life after death.
Other organizations, correct me if I'm wrong, but certain Saturnine groups such as perhaps the Masonic orders, seem to dabble in spiritism yet obsess a wee bit on the importance of getting one's business done Before death occurs. Of course many religious uninitiated folk are counting on making up for present mistakes in some wonderfully Idyllic afterlife.
But I personally do find it interesting, the various attitudes among humans, the codes and lack of codes of honor, the many petty rules of engagement and the chaos that occasionally breaks through into the public view from the shadows.
Some people live their entire lives not really facing their fear of extinction and just hope and count on it happening to others.
Some do the opposite and engage in death defying behaviors.
Others are overtly self damaging and suicidal, but maybe less risky than the previous two groups. Making them very cowardly indeed, but many find themselves asking the question at some point in life.
My advice? It's a god damned tragedy, death, but don't take it personally. Don't let it take what's left. And you can be defiant and use your energy to resist it, like the sword master in the HBO series Game of Thrones tells the little Stark girl, "What do we say to Death when we meet him? We say, 'Not today'."
It is an almost quantum problem, really, this sad and heart wrenching juxtaposition of memory, feelings, and the sudden and irrevocable loss of the source of those things. It is an endless knot with no solution except to hope that Death is not the end of our journey, but merely a door into whatever lies beyond. Until we find ourselves faced with that crossroads, we ought to walk in the grass for as long as we can.
No need to worry about which path to take when there is so much frontier, so much wilderness, so much to be discovered.
There is so much in our small lives worth loving, and we have so little time.
The irony of our lives, we spend many idle moments some of us, reflecting on the wish for life to end, but when we actually spy the end of that road coming nearer, we roll our eyes away from the sight, like a wild horse, and try to deny that probably inevitable end.
We look back at the last second, and we see our lifetime in that moment that transcends time. We Know that we transcend it, every day, but we are so afraid to really embrace the totality of what that means.
Dance of Death, also called Danse Macabre (from the French language), is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all.
The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer.
They were produced as mementos mori, to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life.[1]
Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now-lost mural in the Saints Innocents Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424 to 1425.
It really matters not who was rich, poor, ruler or slave, in the end it is all one.
