By Victor Greto
There’s something both pathetic and childish about our fear of growing old and of death itself, so much so that the only way many of us can deal with it is by caricaturing it.
Our holiday and cultural trivialization of death makes us laugh at it via giggling ghosts, and the cartoon self-righteous violence of high-tech superhero movies and their slasher-movie ancestors.
Death for us has been made a joke because we ultimately want to see it as harmless, fake and controllable. We don’t publicly allow anything real about death to haunt us.
As a journalist and college professor, I have been faced with the reality of my own aging and inevitable death – expressed by the subtly mocking faces of the teenagers I stand in front of each day.
Each fall I’ve grown a year older, but, every school year, those freshmen insist on coming in at 18. It’s like I’m standing in time-lapse, while the rest of the classroom sit frozen in an eternal youth.
There were of course times when I was the kid sitting (as a student) or standing (as a reporter) in front of a successful, older person, thinking: No matter how much money or intelligence or celebrity you have, I have youth. I’m younger. I’m going to outlive you.
Now those cackling chickens have come home to roost.
In front of a classroom, those animated, tired, happy, bored, curious and indifferent faces at times seem like a mocking reproach to my own wizened mug.
But only if I let them.
Just as death can be the reality of watching your dad die in front of you on a hospital bed, it also can be the grinning scythe-wielding skeleton.
How? Perspective. It’s all part of the deal.
Death is the endgame for human beings who get to laugh and have sex and be in love and realize epiphanies and find surprising happiness in the smallest footnote-like moments, whether in a passing glance, or in an accidental touch.
Death also acts as the seal of approval on the pain and tragedy and suffering that we cause ourselves and others, the end of the ambiguity of right and wrong and complexity and those twisted, unconscious feelings that guide us while our conscious minds are off somewhere else.
It’s the universe’s way of taking a breath from our decades-long experience and starting all over again.
Death is about profoundly knowing our place in everything that’s not human, and never knowing our place in all that is.