by Paige Zeller

Created on: December 09, 2009

“I see that all things come to an end, but I find thy commandment exceeding broad.” - Psalm CXIX

Not being particularly religious, the first time I saw this quote was when I went to Westminster Abbey in London. I thought it was a fairly tongue-in-cheek thing to put on a headstone. Looking at the date on the inscription, 1876, it reminded me that it has not been very long since those of us in the Western world started looking at death in a different light.

Prior to the late 19th century, the Western attitude towards death was that it was a part of life and that it could come at any moment. Disease and death were commonplace and visited both poor and rich with cruel regularity. If one managed to survive the litany of childhood diseases, the average life expectancy was somewhere around 50. Plague years in particular would bring mass death, with some towns losing more than 3/4 of their populations in a number of months, with whole extended families obliterated over the course of a few weeks.

With the shadow of death hanging over their heads at all times, there was a widely-held belief that every day a person continued to breathe was another day he cheated the Grim Reaper. It gave them a will to survive and to enjoy life to the greatest extent possible considering the fairly wretched conditions of their time. There was never as much celebration as there was after a plague had passed and the bodies were buried. For the survivors God had been on their side, and their survival was a kind of heavenly mandate.

During the past 150 years, these kind of random mass deaths have become increasingly rare. Improved medical care, sanitation, and nutrition have extended the average lifespan in first-world counties to over 70 years. It is becoming common for people to live into their 90's, or even to reach the century mark. The average American 20-year-old now has a very high chance of living past 75. Every breath one takes is statistically unlikely to be the last.

This new-found longevity has caused most people to take life and others for granted. If one's spouse and children are certain to live for another forty years, a year or three of overtime and neglect is of no great consequence. If a person is confident that he and everyone he loves has a greater than 99.9% chance of waking up tomorrow, the days and hours have no meaning in the grand scheme of things. Life simply becomes one long haul, a great schlep through time with death always a long way off.

There appears to be only one nearly universal exception to this modern way of looking at life and death: survivors. Whether the survival is of cancer, a suicide attempt, an accident, war, or catastrophe, surviving seems to bring home the concept that life is a gamble and that every moment is precious. On their death beds, many of these people swear to God, or whatever deity or force of nature they believe in, that if they're spared they'll change their lives. And many of them do, embracing their fleeting time on this earth with a new sense of intensity.

Like medieval peasants, modern survivors appreciate the fact that they managed to leap over the scythe in a way that many of their contemporaries do not. Survivors understand that God is both the Alpha and the Omega, life and death, the beginning and the end and give both ends of the spectrum the respect and understanding they deserve.

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