20 October

Lots of talk about the ‘sanctity’ of life at the moment, and not much about the sanctity of death. Life and death aren’t even opposites. Arguing when life begins and when it ends, for example in debates on abortion and euthanasia, misses the point that life is not just a circle, where life needs death and death needs life, but also that what is alive is already dead and what is dead is already alive. Your fingernails and hair are dead, but ‘you’ are alive, and you spend 6-10 hours a day unconscious already, as you sleep. If you ‘die’ bacteria and plants will happily feed off you, but they were already doing that while you were ‘alive’ anyway. It’s why I think these debates never go anywhere. You are already immortal in some ways, and already dead in others. If we try to protect and sustain life at all costs, we do great evil because we ignore the importance and sanctity of that part of life that gets called ‘death’. They’re one and the same thing.