To Live Fully in the Face of Death

By: Erik Rittenberry

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity — activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for men… It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.”

— Ernest Becker

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Life, in its cruelest jest, grants us just enough time to become ourselves before it snatches everything away.

We labor through years of uncertainty, forging an identity, sharpening our talents, enduring betrayals, heartbreaks, the slow disillusionment that comes with living—finally reaching the summit of self-possession only to be good for dying.

That’s the irony of life.

Maturity arrives hand in hand with obsolescence; wisdom, that hard-earned prize, is merely the prelude to irrelevance. We master existence just in time to leave it. Seems like a sick joke—this brief rehearsal for an exit no one rehearses for.

Unlike all other species on the planet, we gaze into the abyss of the inevitable—death. We live in the shadows of our mortality. We shuffle through the days of our lives with the significant burden of knowing our fate.

“The weight of the days is dreadful,” Camus reminded us.