The true black friday

In a big city people die unexpectedly all the time, death is the inevitable consequence of life, people fall down stairs, have traffic accidents, close their eyes to sleep and don’t open them again. We have a bargain with death, it is supposed to wait, we expect to join it at the last possible moment, to live long, and the truth is we do. Regardless of how old you are when you die life is forever and we all pass in the only moment we possibly could. We often say that someone died too young, that life was cut short, that they had such a bright future which is now lost, but the truth is you die when you die. You can’t dodge death, or cheat it, if it didn’t happen then it was never going to, you cannot die before your time and the only people for whom death is cruel are the living. My Gran used to say there is no such thing as a near miss, it either hits you or it doesn’t, a miss is a mile.

Unlike taxes death is an absolute certainty, death is non negotiable and there is a curious comfort to be had watching someone like Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates ageing, if it happens to the world’s wealthiest most powerful men then there clearly is no avoiding it. Death is egalitarian, there is only one type, death is like a bottle of coke, it is the real thing, the only thing, we are all on different journeys with a single destination, life is a death sentence.

None of this is bad, nor is a bad thing to lay it out plainly, it only serves to make the living all the more precious, makes every human life rare beyond imagining. History is littered with great attempts to lessen this value, to make us seem unexceptional, to make us live in fear of death but death itself is nothing to be afraid of because you will be dead. Life is the scary bit.

The tragedy is not that people die or that they died young, you never get any older than dead, the tragedy is for those left behind who can only contemplate their own life without those they have lost and whose own mortality is thrown into sharp relief because of it. Through the deaths of others we imagine our own but the fact that we are all destined to die and live with it is one of the things that makes us so extraordinary. Fearing life is exactly what those who seek to destroy desire. The point of terrorism is to terrorise, to make you live in fear, it is not death that we recoil from so much as the taking of the life. Having someone die is bad enough but if that death were deliberate, an act of senseless, premeditated violence then this is the most serious offence that one human can commit against another.

Acts against civilians are never legitimate, are never war, holy or otherwise, they are crimes. People die every day from causes that can be comprehended and accepted but the taking of a life for nothing more than the killer’s witless politics, than their perverted view of God and earth is to change death for the bereaved from a celebration of life into a recognition of the most profound loss. Rather than be cherished in the heaven of our memory those who are lost are tortured in the hell of our grief. Death is not to blame for the sadness and fear, death is not that cruel, those who choose to bring it upon us are, we must not live the life they want for us. Terrorism is not war, it is murder.