Enjoy life while you have it

I HAVE just learnt a new word, thanotophobia – an intense and irrational fear of death that is sweeping India ( POST, September 9).

When the sudden realisation of death washes over us, many try to banish thoughts too terrible to contemplate.

We need to get it into our thick skulls and beyond argument that we are all mortal. Death is a charlatan, a cheat… a dark ocean, beyond end, beyond depth. We live in a world without nets, none to catch us. How delicate is the fine line between life and death? Life has no meaning without the presence of death. Life is simply the absence of death.

There is no privacy in death. The pathologist cuts you up, weighs your organs, examines your stomach contents, takes tissue samples and tests your blood.

A human being with a lifetime of experiences is then labelled like a piece of furniture in a catalogue. Perhaps we can extract a measure of solace when people say that death is not the greatest loss in life.

Loss is when life dies inside you while you are still alive. So we should all celebrate the event called life. A great Japanese philosopher, Daisku Ikeda, once proclaimed “Everything passes. Both soaring joys and crushing sorrows fade away like a dream. However, the knowledge of having lived one’s life to the fullest, never disappears.”

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If God doesn’t get you , the devil will!

Enjoy the journey.

KEVIN GOVENDER Shallcross