"WHAT'S DEATH?"

Beyond the empirical understanding of death as an end to life, there is a grand mystery enshrouding the end of our respective timelines. There has been an eon of mythology, religious belief, scientific research, and theorising on the great unifier, but no thorough and final explanation. Everyone has their own truth: death is the gate to the afterlife, to heaven and hell; death is rebirth; death is a transformation of state; death is oblivion.

It may, instead, be easier to answer this question in an entirely different light. Rather than seeing death as our own individual end, we should view it from the standpoint of those still alive. To the living, our death is moment of loss. It is a funeral on a brisk autumn morning. It is a moment of timelessness, when suddenly, for just one person, the clock stops ticking – and the rest of the world sees them forevermore as a snapshot, an eternal, frozen figure that never ages, never changes.

Some people spend their lives in search of immortality. But there is only one cure for death, and that is death itself. A young death, terrible as that may be, is eternal youth. Death in old-age is one's long-awaited moment of peace and timelessness. It is never an answer to life's suffering, but it is an inevitability. Death is the mystery and the reality, the unifier and equaliser, the ephemeral and the infinite.

Death is living forever.