Baskadia

One second, two seconds... An eternity passes until the next toll of the mourning bell.

Solemn faces in juxtaposition to one another filled the room, dead silence everywhere.

I looked around the room for the casket where the body of the deceased was to be housed but found none, neither did I see the bereaved family weeping at the cruel fate dealt to them by the universe.

There were no last rites being held either, this was a funeral without any dead.

I looked at them and asked, for what reason do we mourn?

And for who's sake do we pay Requiem?

Solemnly They spoke,

Mournfully They answered me;

Memento Mori was what They said,

This is in remembrance of the inevitability of death, They all echoed in unison.

Man must die sooner or later, and as such there is no real meaning to life, better to come to terms with the reality than let the fear and dread of it rule over us.

Who are "They" you might ask?

They are the happenings in life that seem to point out the futility of living, the things like the passing of loved ones that alert us to the inevitable end that awaits us all.

What then is death I ask you,

What does it mean to die, to stop living?

If that's the case then almost everyone of us is already dead.

As a wise man once said, we don't live just so we can die, we die as a testament to the fact that we once lived.

Only in death is life made precious and as such we are to treasure every second of it because once it is lost can never be regained.

The dead have no feelings, we may want to console ourselves with the vain hopes that by fulfilling the wishes of the dead they may find peace in the afterlife but the truth is what is dead is dead.

The only thing we can do for the dead is to live our lives to the fullest, so that if we meet them on the other side, wherever that is, we can tell them how we lived right up until the moment we died and didn't let the fear and dread of the inevitable turn us into dead men walking.

Memento mori you say, I say memento vivere.