Beauty, death and the inexpicable

Beauty is everywhere, just as is death.

The rose is for many a
 symbol of beauty, but equally
linked to death.

Interestingly, and paradoxically, I’m midway through reading a book about beauty and a rash of deaths have impacted on my life.

Death has a perverse beauty, but that is conditional, the caveat being that the exit must be timely; death should be the culmination of a life well-lived, or at least on that allowed for the realization of the person’s hopes and dreams.

Anything sooner than that leaves us with a hollowness, an uncertainty and the nagging question of why?

Of course the technicalities of why can easily be answered, but there are grander implications that arouse confusion and mystery when the death appears untimely.

Humanity broadly understands, and so generally accepts, that death awaits us all, rather patiently, at the end of a well-lived life.

We become confused and the mystery of why only deepens when the imagined scythe-wielding reaper appears early in someone’s life, gives a somewhat sickly smile as our friends depart with a rush we are unable to understand.

This recent rash of deaths began with the expected, but early, death of friend in her 60s – expected as it was, she had time to hand paint her own coffin.

Next it was Jill Meagher, someone I obviously didn’t know, but like many others, the television images of her final moments were etched in my mind making the connection with that young woman strangely real.

Recently, the “reaper” swooped by, much closer.

Lunch with a friend a few weeks back on a Friday was followed the next morning by a relatively innocuous accident that was to take his life a few days later.

He wasn’t ready to go as he had much to do and it was only at that Friday lunch he had talked about statistically having another twenty healthy years to live. He was alive with enthusiasm.

Even more difficult to understand was the death last week of a 28-year-old workmate who had undergone an operation to further repair damage to a leg injured in a road accident nearly two decades ago.

She was young, married and along with her husband was building a life together, but on Friday all the hopes and dreams fell into ruin.

This seemingly nonsensical conclusion to well-lived lives causes us to again wonder why bad things happen to good people.

Searching for answers, I quizzed a Christian friend, whose beliefs are the antithesis of mine, but he provided little comfort, adding only that it was an age-old question.

Struggling with the vacuum that is death we can do little, it seems, but fill the bizarre and confusing nothingness with reassuring and comforting images and memories of that person’s innate beauty, the warmth of their engaging smile and their generousity.