Everything that has ever lived has died

Everything that has ever lived has died, unless it hasn't died... yet.

This is a true statement.

It also feels impertinent somehow.

It feels morbid.

But I was thinking about this fact this morning and it seems impossible. That I am walking around, looking at things, experiencing stuff, that all around me seems a world teeming with life, and that all of this life will die in the not too distant future. That I will die. That I will be gone. That all these things will be gone. That my cats will be gone. That the plant on my window sill will be gone. That my neighbors will be gone. That the alley cat who lives in back of my house and the weeds that grow in the backyard and the birds that sit on the electric wires and the cockroaches that sometimes emerge from behind this sink... That every single one of these things will die and disappear one day and that this is just the tiniest fraction of imagination of the enormity of it all.

It seems crazy, really. That we aren't all thinking about it and pulling our hair out, losing our minds, freaking the fuck out about the incomprehensible loss.

I was thinking about this fact this morning and thinking about an article I read that said that 55 million people die every year and that this is the equivalent of all of England. I was thinking, "Where will they all go?" How can we keep burying the entire country of England. They can't all get special treatment. They can't all get a headstone with a name and a date that is taken care of and looked after. Eventually, there won't be any room left. 

I was thinking about graveyards. I was thinking about a book I read by Bill Bryson where he talked about how the ground around very old churches in England is so much higher than it was hundreds of years ago because there are so many people buried over top of each other. I was thinking about how they found King Richard III under a parking lot.

I was thinking about how crazy an idea a graveyard is. I was thinking about those ads on TV that tell you that we have to fight cancer or heart disease or diabetes. I was thinking about how those same ads yell that thousands of people die every year of preventable diseases like these. I kept thinking, but in the end... it has to be something. I mean, we all know that eventually it has to be something that kills us.

I was thinking about what would happen if we manage, somehow, to prevent all the preventable diseases. I was wondering about what happens beyond this. If we don't die in our houses from heart attacks like we used to, if we don't die from cancer in a slow and painful way, will there be something beyond this, some non-preventable disease that is even worse? Are we making our lives worse because we cannot come to terms with them ending?

Or maybe we will graduate to completely preventable endings. Perhaps we will decide that when the unpreventable is upon us it will be time to find something preventable but pleasurable in its place. I heard about an art project called the Euthanasia Roller Coaster the other day. First I was shocked. Then I was kind of upset at the maker. Then I thought, "Well... If it really is nice and you're in a lot of pain and you're going to die soon anyway... Maybe that's better than falling on your bed in a heap or sitting in a hospital room or being on a surgery table." I wondered if we're really parsing minutes or days or months... I don't know. Maybe it's better to have some last thing to look forward to.

I don't know. It's not something I think about a lot.

And it's hard to know what to do with such thoughts when you begin to...