So we were allowed to watch a bit of the opening of the Olympics at work and eat pizza and ice cream and that was awesome as hell as well as colossally embarrassing
but
those of you who watched will know that they did a small tribute of people who had passed on with a song and dance routine before the parade of nations
and this woman to the right of me just said “dude, that’s kind of random, showing a bunch of dead people.”
Now, I don’t like making scenes, but I was compelled to ask her why she thought it was random. She looked a bit flustered and annoyed and said it had no relevance to the Olympics.
I basically said something along the lines of ‘when is death irrelevant to anything’ and I don’t think she got whatever I said because she left and the whole thing was awkward, but I’m just left to wonder how many other people felt the same way about that segment.
Is the world so utterly unaware that it is always, in some place, dying? That there are people who will be watching this year’s Olympics without that person that they were sat beside four years ago, or eight, or twelve? That perhaps, in four years, they won’t be there to watch it themselves? Is death really so closeted away and 'awkward’ to people? Is death not something that we should talk about and remember and love? Yes, I do mean love. We have to love life, but we must love death, we must love the memories and the laughter and the sadness that is so painful to us when all this has passed, because that is the truest sign that life is important. If we ignore death we cannot cherish life. We have to love death to accept it.
Is death not acceptable any more? Are we so busy with distracting ourselves from our very own mortality that we cannot appreciate that being mortal is what makes it so amazing that we are?
I don’t know, maybe it was just me reading into it too much or being too philosophical, but that little instance just made me terribly, terribly sad.
