Concerning Death and Childhood

I was not always one to think about death, an in the moments that it showed up in my life, I tended to stuff it more than anything else. The family friends and grandparents who died didn't have a profound enough impact on my life to really shake up my world...and so I think the easiest thing to do was just get on with life and not think about it too much. I know that a lot of people have had much worse experiences with death than I have, and so this blog is really an attempt to look at the world from their eyes.

A child who grows up with death is a very delicate thing. Children see things in extremely subjective and imaginative ways, and so their concept of death will probably be much different from that of an adult. Seeing the animated documentary that consisted of children talking about death made me appreciate just how special the mind of a child is. The struggle to understand something as mysterious as death lasts our entire lifetime, and the later stages are not any simpler than the first moments of curiosity. Death is the pinnacle of human concern, since it is so inevitable and unrelenting, and yet the attitude of the typical adult is to act as if life lasts for as long as we want it to. We tend to move on with our trivial concerns, placing the utmost significance into things that fail to match our deeper longing for the eternal and the supreme. Children seem to get it a lot better than a lot of us a lot of the time... Their persistent questions of "why?" might drive us crazy, but at the end of the day we ask those same questions with just as much curiosity, and the added desperation of a life lived too long without answers.

But maybe the reason for why we don't get some of the answers we want is because we have stopped asking the questions. Maybe instead of trying to get the children to shut up and accept our point of view, we should be wondering along with them; we should be philosophers, discussing things like death with children, our fellow philosophers, and continuously searching for the answers. And maybe, just maybe, we will eventually see a little bit of the truth, just enough to get us infatuated with life and its mysteries so that we have even more reason to continue on our quest for the ultimate. I think that this path is the one that will eventually, inevitably lead the seeker to the arms of God. So let's not silence those who see what we often fail to recognize; children are on to something, and we should join them in their pursuit for truth.