Since I was a kid I've always been fascinated with death. Ok, maybe 'fascination' is too strong a word; it presents itself almost like a mystery I have to solve, the rationalising of the underlying fear associated with it, the dreaded finality, and what part religion played in mitigating this fear.
As I lay in bed last night watching my wife sleep, I wondered what could be more fearsome than death itself. Thinkers would say the death of the mind is more fearsome than a physical death. Religious people would say the death of the faith, and of course free men and women would say the death of freedom and the human spirit.
But that's not what I'm referring to; I'm talking about what consequence would be more unbearable than death? If say, someone close to us were to pass on, would that be the ultimate and worst possible thing that could happen? And I realised what it was. It's the same thing that causes fear in all human beings - the fear of the unknown. What if a person is not dead, but missing - taken by a hostile person? I think for me, that would be a fate worse than death - where there is, in fact, no finality, no closure.
I know for a fact I would all my resources and turn my entire mind to hunting down the perpetrator and making sure he (human predators are usually male; isn't that odd?) stays alive a Very Long time. The scene in "a law abiding citizen" where the rapist and murderer is killed painfully, loudly, and most importantly, over a period of time, comes to my mind.
A fate worse than death is not that unimaginable, after all.
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