The High Cost of Living
(A nod to Neil Gaiman, of course)

The intrinsic understanding the dream world had availed me of its physicality allowed not only the ground rushing up towards me to fill me with the fear of death, but also to put me at peace with the knowledge that I would not actually die. This was a dream after all, and I would only wake as I slammed into the canyon floor. (Freud was wrong.)

I opened my eyes. The dream had ended. It was dead. It was nothing more than a memory: a photograph on the back of my eyelids. Is this then what death is? Is death when something is left only as a memory? Is death when the thing can no longer speak for itself? The dream was gone, and I lived to tell the tale. Then what happened to the dream? Did Morpheus retake his creation to recycle it as someone else’s nighttime fantasy? Did it simply vanish? Or did it retreat to the Dreaming to live out the rest of eternity in indescribable peace? Not one person or thing can know. One person or thing can only guess.

By trade, writers are guessers. They pontificate wildly upon topics that erect a protective wall of mystery before the intrusive eyes of science and religion. It is all a guess. Some guesses are accepted by scientists, and some are accepted clergy, but it is still all a guess.

To Gray’s Anatomy, death is the ending of all vital functions or processes in an organism or cell. To the Bible, death is the final state of the unsaved, and “…he who keeps My word shall never see it.” To the scientists, Gray’s Anatomy is indisputably correct. To the Christians, the science is incomplete. Neither views are wrong. Science cannot disprove faith, nor can faith disprove science. Writers accept this fact, thrive off of it, and then make names for themselves with it.

To young Raymond Douglas Bradbury, “Death is your little sister one morning when you look into her crib and see her staring at you with blank, blue eyes… When you stand by her high chair four weeks later and realize she’ll never be in it again to make you jealous of her because she was born…”

To Neil Gaiman’s character, Robert Gadling, “Death is rubbish… The only reason people die is because everyone does it. You all just go along with it.”

Abbe Faria, Dumas’ heroic mentor to the Count of Monte Cristo, views death as “…sole consolation of my wretched existence… God grants that there no longer exists for me distance or obstacle.”

Then what defines death? Each writing exposes a different view on the subject. Each writing is just as arguably correct as the next because each writing draws expertise from the same vast uncertainty. Upon reflection, we come to the conclusion that death is logically indefinable but by one overlooked trait: nothing may die without first living. Death is the price paid for life. Whether it is a cell phone, chivalry, or a person that has died, it is innately understood in any philosophy, that these things were once alive. Death, in all its incarnations, is the high cost of living.