It is such a cliché to say that life is fragile, we never know how long or how short our life journeys will last. But it’s no longer a cliché when it proves true, and death befalls someone you know, someone you love, or someone you’re used to having around you. The powerlessness of the cliché then becomes a dark cloud that surrounds your soul, an unspoken weariness that hangs over your consciousness.

It’s good to think about death every once in a while, especially when one is entrenched in an ethos which is preoccupied with the obsession to live this earthly life for as long as possible (and to even cheat death, if possible).

Death brings a sudden silence; a silence which those who are alive never really care to cultivate. This is perhaps why the sudden silence emerges when death befalls, because the momentousness of life abruptly ceases and the spirit within us is shocked from the inertia of speed and sound. Cultivation of silence as a habit of the heart is a good preparation for death.

Death can be a form of healing for those who find life unbearingly painful. This is not to say that the prerogative of life and death belongs to the person himself, but rather, that God’s “administering” of physical death to a person can be seen as a way of providing relief. Of course, such healing brings pain to those alive. But at times, the pain felt by those who are ill is so excruciating that even at death, those alive heave a sigh of relief at the release which the ill person experiences in death.

It might seem strange that death be articulated in such positive overtones. But aren’t we the ones who have cheated death, literally, since we belong to the One who has trampled down death by death? Death may get the better of us, but we will get the best out of death.