The Fear of Death

Nobody wants to check out earlier than planned. Even the suicidal want to die on their own terms, whatever those might be. Surprise, unplanned death is almost universally hated and feared.

The media reaction to the Kirk assassination here in the US is a reminder of a few things: first, that our delusion of personal safety relies on everything staying more or less the same in our environments. This includes people staying alive; economic conditions being more or less as expected (and in the case of the US right now, bad); and in the US, the idea that we really aren’t exposed to much real life violence, which is the status quo here.

I feel like reminding people the status quo is only what they’ve been lead to expect and normally experience. It is not an ironclad contract with the universe. What you might normally experience or expect can change at any time, and typically does change. We simply lie to ourselves that it’s always been that way, or otherwise justify the change in a way that makes us comfortable.

Real violent death (as opposed to fictional death in media) is not something many people in the US have a lot of experience with. Many of us expect, not without reason, to go our whole lives without encountering it. That, in itself, is very much not an expectation that most of the world and our school age children here in the US can expect, given the frequency of school shootings. It is, for lack of a better way to put it, a delusion for a particular group of people.

I also feel like reminding people that your favorite media personality or the media personalities you despise don’t know who you are nor do they care. They are not a good thing to hang your sense of personal safety on, and you don’t have a relationship with them. You might have a relationship with their content or at least the expectation that you can get more content, but you don’t know them. Let them live and die without being metaphorically enlisted in the cast of your life. They would never have showed up to your personal drama, and their content is an impersonal as it is repeatable.

Second, the reaction is, as much as anything, a reminder that the majority of the people in the US think that this life is their only shot. About this, I get to be comforting, which is a relative rarity in this situation.

One of the nice things about vodou is that we don’t believe this is your only shot. This is not your only life. Should you die, even if you die unexpectedly or violently, you will be back. A different time, a different body, a different context—you will be back until you have mastered every lesson the divine needs you to master. The most death is, for us, is a goodbye that might not even be a goodbye in this life. The soul, or the part of the soul which persists, will be back again. It cannot be destroyed.

For many people, the idea of changing context and surprise is the really scary part of death. It’s less the death and more the unknown, the unplanned, the idea of no longer having the same world that frightens them. To that, vodou generally shrugs. Change is, for better or worse, inevitable. People will die, come back, and die again. The world around you changes continuously. It is up to you if you want to view that as something intended to personally harm or a part of the cycle of life.

I prefer, and encourage others, to think of death this way: we get to start over. Sometimes, that’s very welcome. Sometimes, it’s a terrifying surprise.

Either way, the soul gets to come and try again.