Let dead dogs lie

Let them lie there I say. Leave them be. The dead can give us nothing more.

Look, I'm not being literal. It's a metaphor, ok. What I'm doing, see, is comparing dogs to people - which is not obvious in the header and first 3 sentences, but will be if you keep reading.

Death is always tragic. Even if you've been suffering from some disease that debilitates you day by day, actually and finally dying is something no one celebrates - much less if it was sudden and unexpected. So when the army dude crashed his plane and died together with his sweetheart (was the the story? Details can be so spurious) or when that man accidentally rolled over his 9-month pregnant wife with his truck killing her and the baby, we are appropriately saddened. Life, with its difficulties and dark moments, glory only in a few things - new life, best represented by babies and marriage. We spend a few minutes in solemn silence then move on to the comic page. What else are we to do?

Tomorrow comes along and army dude and toll-truck guy get into the news again. This time, parents/relatives are photographed bawling away with the caption '(His/her name) didn't even get a chance to eat durians!' or 'I cooked his favourite sambal ikan bilis but he didn't make it home to eat it!' Bawl bawl.

So what? SO WHAT? Is one to forever subject oneself to useless reminiscings or to attach tragic significance to what is already full of memory and regret? Is death itself not painful, not tragic, not fearful enough that we feel the need to add a bit of local flavour to the echoes that are already reverberating in desperate emptiness? How do we make death worse? How can we possibly quantify the ending of a life?

We can't! Death is the ultimate end. The final darkness, the beckoning abyss. And it should be left that way. To say that death is made worse because of these kind of things is to dilute and deny.