Not a dress rehearsal for death
NATURAL calamities and disasters defy our ability to forget because these remind us of something we all fear: death. After the recent earthquake, there are news reports about condominium dwellers having recurring nightmares of being buried alive beneath the rubble.
Although the memory of calamities lingers, the fear they arouse is shortlived. Proof: people who fled in panic from giant malls fearing these might collapse, rushed back to the same malls after only a few days to watch “Avengers: Endgame.” Movies that trivialize our mortality have become one of our defensive strategies against our fear of death. We see bodies being maimed or destroyed on the screen, but these seldom affect us. After all, those bodies are not ours.
We have also become oblivious of the tragic reality of death with the help of funeral parlors that prettify corpses so they would look “alive.” Well-manicured memorial parks, elegant crematoria, and columbaria have successfully abolished the smell and sounds of death, creating the illusion that we don’t really die — we become merely out of sight. The beauty industry and giant pharmaceuticals blur our awareness of death by endlessly churning out products that delay or hide the ravages of aging, or medicine that cure death-dealing diseases.
Language itself reflects our forgetfulness of death. We no longer say “He died” or “He passed away.” We now use the following euphemisms: “He bought the farm, kicked the bucket, slept with the fishes, pushed daisies.” Or, “He was reformatted by God.” In Filipino, we have words like “tepok,” “tigok,” or “dedbol,” to make death less menacing.
Death has also been reduced to entertainment blabber through the Internet. I came across a website, Death Clock, that gives viewers a chilling sense of their mortality. I do not know how they do it, but less than two seconds after you typed some data
about yourself, the website programmers would come up with the exact day when you will die. Based on its computation, I am supposed to die on Thursday, April 8, 2027.
Out of curiosity, I keyed in some information about a friend’s date of birth. I was shocked by what I saw in the computer. It says that he died on July 14, 2017! I took the phone, dialed my friend’s number, and there he was, talking to me. I closed the website immediately. I did not want to think of my friend as a zombie.
Our tendency to trivialize death has a profound impact and consequences on our life. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross writes: “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes easy to postpone the things you must do. In contrast, when you fully understand that each day can be your last, you take the time that day to grow, to become more of who you really are, and to reach out to other human beings.”
Our life on earth is not a perpetual earthquake drill or a dress rehearsal for death. In His resurrection, Jesus taught us that our final destiny is not the grave, but everlasting life. If we use every moment as an opportunity to live fully, love intensely, and laugh merrily (despite the trials and pain we experience), our life on earth becomes a dress rehearsal for the resurrection.
In today’s gospel reading, His comforting words, “Peace be with you” (John 20:19), dispelled the fear of death of His disciples. And when He showed them the wounds inflicted on Him during His passion and crucifixion, they firmly believed that He had indeed conquered death once and for all. So they look forward to what “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined — what God has prepared for those who love him.” (I Corinthians 2:9).
Indeed, for those who believe, it is LIFE, not death, that comes without warning.