My mind suddenly wraps itself upon the topic of death once again. It is, I realize, a frequent topic of my profession, one that I am guaranteed to revisit again and again, and while intellectually, I recognize that it is a simple fact of life, viscerally, it still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

S. writes about one of her classmates dying all of a sudden. Like her, I am stunned by the idea that someone my age or younger can suddenly just die, almost without warning. A few years ago, there was an ominous convergence of three people who died in car accidents. One was my classmate who died on the I-80 somewhere in Nevada, which, eerily was roughly around the same place where a friend of my sister died later that year. Soon after that, a friend of my brother died on the I-15 coming back from Las Vegas.

My sister’s friend who died, her name was Elaine, and we went to see her at the funeral home, and it remember getting really depressed. It makes no sense, really. Other than in terms of the mindless laws of physics, at least.

Growing up Catholic, I’ve always had an answer to the question “Why do people have to die?” Death is the price we pay for disobeying God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As I continue in the 5th year of my protracted crisis of faith, I’ve begun to wonder if God was really that short-sighted and vengeful.

J.R.R. Tolkien gives an alternate rationale for Death: it is God’s Gift to Humanity. Tolkien insinuates the idea that the grief of living forever while everything else around you changes and dies would not be worth immortality, and I’ve begun to believe that.

In any case, I think the mistake was eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Maybe “Knowledge of Good and Evil” is really an awkward translation for consciousness. Without eating from this Tree, we would never know that we know. (Epistemology and hermeneutics would never exist.) Because I imagine bacteria and mayflies and probably even dogs and cats and maybe even dolphins and octopi don’t really ponder their fleeting existence. They just exist and then they just don’t. There is no existential dilemma. But because we are forced to be conscious, because we can envision things that may not be real and because we can make attempts at predicting the future, we know very early on in our lives that we are going to die.

Life and death is such a built-in cycle to the universe. I can’t imagine God really having made us originally immortal and then deciding out of spite to make us mortal. I think this is really the way he meant it to be. Think of how the universe formed from nothingness, that massive initial singularity splintering into everything that exists. Think how new stars are formed from the exploding remnants of old stars, and how this perpetual dying and renewal is necessary for the production of elements heavier than lithium. The building blocks of life—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus—were all created in the violent death throes of massive stars. We are stardust, you and I.

Nothing lasts forever. Even the proton is predicted to decay eventually (although far longer than anyone has really predicted.) I don’t think God made a mistake here.

Add to this the religion of my ancestors, where there is no afterlife, and no immortal soul. When you die, your lifeforce dissipates into the universe, to be reused for those who come after you.

And at last we come to Mayan beliefs. First Father and his ultimate sacrifice so that the universe could exist. Without Death, there cannot be Life. (I just finished watching “The Fountain” which touches on a lot of these profound issues.)

Spinning this back against the stories of all the people I’ve known and met who have died, I still don’t really get it. Sure, the intellectual notion that things have to die so that others can continue to live is simple enough, but I can’t seem to wrap it around the idea that random instances of death of people whose potentials were never realized are supposed to be meaningful.

It’s different when it’s a disease. When day-by-day, the cancer grows or the infection spreads. These are the things I can understand. You can’t really fight entropy. And in the end I think it’s better to face death peacefully rather than fight kicking and screaming in futility. But I don’t know where the 25 year old soldier who gets blown up by an IED fits in. The 23 year old who gets ejected out of a car at 80 mph. The babies that die of SIDS. Where does this all fit in in the great scheme of things? Is it really just the cruel caprice of the universe?

Why?

Far better minds than mine have pondered this question, as far back as we could reason, and no one has an answer. I suppose there are truly things that are far worse than death, and I always imagine the end of suffering as being a blessing. But what do I know.

So I ask again, very plaintively, knowing full well that I’m not going to get an answer: Why do people have to die?