Death... We all know that the end of life is a possibility on any day, yet something within us continually tries not to see and to deny this possibility. We all accept death as a certainty, but this acceptance is more like knowledge of a natural phenomenon than an acceptance of “my death.”

We all know that, if nothing else can be said with certainty about the future of any living being that is born, we can say with certainty that one day it will die. Yet even with all the certainty of our knowledge, death remains a truth “out there,” something unrelated to us. For as long as we are alive, we always see the dying of others, and in the end we are still here. We accompany to the cemetery the dead who once lived beside us and finally return home, always alive. It is therefore natural that death should seem to be something out there which, although certain, does not concern us very much.

We push life forward toward tomorrow, certain that there will be a tomorrow, even though the possibility that tomorrow may not exist grows steadily as the days of our lives pass. Each of us has among our friends those who have gone, whose social-media pages somewhere in the past became silent memorials to a time when they, too, were alive like us.

Death is not out there. It is within us, and it remains here until the day it becomes us. With its arrival, we will be only another absence among the countless people who have not existed for thousands of years.

The truth is that amid the vastness of galaxies and infinite time, our being “here” and in “this moment” is stranger than our absence and non-being in the past and future. That we have been thrown into this temporary existence, within the infinity of non-being before and after ourselves, is a naked truth standing before us. It looks into our eyes every day and asks what we will do with it. We avert our gaze and look toward tomorrow, immersing ourselves and falling into the banal forgetfulness we all share.

We can console ourselves with another life waiting after death—another life that is itself a continuation of the same tomorrow from which we refuse, even for a moment, to turn our eyes and answer our temporary life when it asks what we intend to do with it.

We pass through life as though it were backstage at a performance and we were rehearsing for the day we will finally appear on stage. Yet there is no backstage. This is the performance itself, and we are moving toward the final curtain.

We human beings do not believe in death, because if we did, we would live intensely and honestly with ourselves, and perhaps be a little kinder and more compassionate toward those who share this passing wonder with us before “never being here again.”

Aydin Areta