kfan:
I was lying in bed awake last night at 2:30, wondering what my problem is, that I have to try and ascribe meaning to death. I wouldn’t be saying stupid shit about death being a lesson if my children were trapped under a pile of rubble in China.
I still basically agree with what I said, if we’re talking about death as an abstraction, but it’s not, and there are infinitely less offensive ways to say it.
I think part of the problem is that we talk about death as if it were just one thing, one function, one unit of experience. The death of a grandmother in her eighties and the deaths of children under rubble are barely even connected, but we still use this catch-all word for them.
Our language is clumsy in the description of transition/degrees. It causes a lot of misunderstanding.