Death

“I knew if I stayed around long enough something like this would happen”

   What do the words mean? See what happen?

His own gravestone

   These are the words carved in the gravestone of George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950). He was an Irish play writer and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. He was the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend whom he survived. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling from a ladder. 

   Despite his fame in life, these words show his cynical attitude toward his own death. They even seem to make a joke about it.

George Bernard Shaw

   I knew if I stayed around long enough something like this would happen.

      In the short phrase which Bernard Shaw seemed to have spat out, it shows what the death really is about. Everyone dies. Death is something that is fair to everyone. People are destined to die from the very moment they are born. Since they are babies, they are slowly dying. They are cliché phrases, as well as being something axiomatic. These are rather depressing concepts to think about. However, they are true.

     People’s fear about death has existed from a long times ago, ever since our ancestor started to praise and hold ceremonies for the afterlife and death. In Middle Ages in Europe, people’s fear about unknown world beyond death had led them to rely on religion. Religion was a sort of phenomenon sweeping Middle Ages. People repented their sins, hoping to go to the Heaven. Clergymen even sold Indulgence—the ticket that would grant them shorter ‘waiting time’ in purgatory(place between the secular world and Heaven). For emperor Qin Shu Huang( 259 BC – 210 BC) in China, was looking for a medicine that would grant him immortality. Modern technologies have developed to grant people longer lives. There are even peculiar experiences, though its validity has not been proven, practicing freezing human quickly and thawing them in the future to grant them lives that defy one's fate and time. Or, people take indifferent attitude toward death, not easily being able to imagine their own death. They distance themselves from the word, thinking it is something happening to others, happening to themselves in a far away future in the horizon.

   After all, people do not have such positive mind set toward death. They lament and express their great sorrows. Their beloved are gone forever. They certainly have some negative feelings about death. I am not saying it does not apply in my case, too. As a seven-year-old girl, I prayed to the God in my bed every night to keep my beloved people around me ‘alive’ with me forever. Losing somebody was the last thing I wanted to do. At the same time, it is something I could not avoid.

   I knew if I stayed around long enough something like this would happen.

   

everyone dies

   Looking at the quotation, a lot of thoughts crossed my mind. That I needed to live a life that I would not regret, since I would one day, die. That one should not feel so overwhelmed by dying or losing somebody.

   However, the idea that struck me hard was what death really was about. Death was something like that—basically it was something that one meets.

Simple, obvious, axiom. However, a thought not a lot of people get to ponder about. Death. Like getting a cold or growing in height in teen-age, dying is a phase that everyone goes through as a human. No matter how hard one tries to distance oneself from the word, it is the closest word that stands by in our lives. No matter how big of a fuss we make about death, death was 'something like that'. It.