I was obviously a depressing child...

Death; it never leaves us. It hangs above us like a bitter cloud. The end, the apex, the complete cessation of life and physical senses stalks us throughout existence. We can feel its breath upon our necks; hear the ticking of its clock and the beating of its perversely excited heart. The existence of non-existence is irremovably woven into the fabric of life. Without death, there is no knowledge of mortality, no motivation to make use of the phenomenon of life and no cause to reflect upon it. When standing in the face of death we must ask ourselves; what does it mean to be alive? Is life something that came from nothing or is it something that has always been and always will be? Are the unborn made of the same stuff as the deceased? Is there an afterlife or a further existence beyond our mortal coils? These questions are posed but never answered by death that, in its silence is but a mirror in which we are forced to gaze upon our own fragility. I love death. It is the bringer of peace, of tranquility and freedom. It returns us to the state of ignorant bliss which we felt before we were dragged from serenity and forced into a weak and ill-fated corpse and made to agonise over the end of something we wished had never begun. If life has but one purpose, it is to teach us to embrace death; to welcome the unavoidable and rejoice in its superiority. We all must die. In time our bodies will fall, ancient and decrepit and we can only hope that the thing that made us who we were, our soul, lives on in some form.