How do we live knowing everything we love will eventually go away?

One of the questions our class came up with from Lincoln in The Bardo that I didn't think we got to talk enough about was how we live knowing that everything we love will eventually no longer be here. I was used to talking about the idea of my own death already because of our first few classes, but this question made look at death from a slightly different perspective. It's already uncomfortable for people to think about their own death, but living life without people or things that mean the most to me one day is another difficult idea to think about. I think there are a couple of reasons as to why we are able to continue our lives knowing that they are bound to end one day. The first reason being slightly more obvious, we are naturally scared of what we don't know a lot about and what could possibly come after death is completely uncertain. So, we try not to think about death as an optimistic reflex. I also think that all the questions we have death are part of what fuels us to keep living. These uncomfortable thoughts of death remind us that our lives are not guaranteed, and they give us a sense of urgency to go do what we love and spend time with who we care about while we have the chance. If we knew we had forever to accomplish everything we wanted in our life, we wouldn't feel nearly as much pressure as we do now to get all of that done. 

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  1. Deborah Adekunle-OdeleyeJanuary 19, 2019 at 3:29 AM

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  2. Ethan HerringFebruary 11, 2019 at 8:41 AM

    This post includes the assertion that people often live in denial of death. I would agree; there is certainly no part of the mainstream American lifestyle that would force many people to confront death on a regular basis that I can think of, so, yes; most people probably spend very nearly the entirety of the period between deaths of people very close to them without once really thinking about death. However, I have a problem with the assertion that "all the questions we have about death are part of what fuels us to keep living." My issue with this assertion is that, if one is uncertain about death and wants to find out more, and no one has found the answers about death in 200,000 years through life, then avoiding death is not going to teach them anything. Uncertainty about death may generate a fear of death, because humans fear the unknown, and life is all that we know, so people may keep on living in order to avoid facing the potential horror of death, but I do not believe that it is often due to one's curiosity about death.

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