Can we cheat Death?

My mother once said that when man plans tomorrow, he never plans to die and at the end of the road, death is the only phenomena in life that we are absolutely certain will occur.  So can we cheat death? Can any man outwit nature? Does anyone know how to outfox destiny? Can we postpone our time when death calls our number up?

The Story

Even before I watched the Final destination sequels, my grandmother told me a story when I was a child about a man who Death was out to get him because his name was at the top of the list; which is Death’s list. Death arrived at his house on the night of his demise. My grandmother said that Death was tired because he had a long day at the wars in Vietnam and needed to rest. The man saw Death’s Fatigue and offered to give him food and a place of rest for the night.  The man waited until Death was comfortably asleep when he decided to take a peek at Death’s List. The man saw his name at the top of the list and knew that he was the next one to die. The man decided to take an eraser and remove his name from the top of the list to the bottom. 

Death woke up the next morning and peered at the man asleep on the bed and a wave of pity came over him.  He mused how the man was good to him and was a good human being over all. Death grabbed his list and clutched it to his heart without even glancing at the names and said towards the ground  “because he is such a good man, I will not start from the top today Hades, today I will begin from the bottom…so take the one from the bottom”

When our number is up…it is up!!!

As a child I thought the story did not end how I expected or wanted it to end. My grandmother said that “when your time comes, it comes and you can’t escape”.  She says that there are no guarantees in life and that many people assumed that because they were good, rich or powerful that Hades will overlook their mortality. She told me that good people die and bad people die. We cannot escape death because it is inevitable.

She told me that the reason why your legs died first (she said that when a person is dying their legs get cold before the rest of the body) was because Death knew that man would run and therefore death kills the legs first so that man could not run from him.  My grandmother was the typical folklore Jamaican grandmother with stories that entertained but also inform. I never tire of hearing her stories.

Death is the constant reminder of how frail our existence is. I once listened to a song that claims “we live as if we will never die and when we die, it is as if we never lived.  It rang true. When Michael Jackson died he was moaned for weeks and then people became consumed with their lives and the world moved on, because there were more important things  happening in the lives of those that are alive than those that are dead. 

One writer says that we are born to die, therefore why are we striving to live.  Tupac Shakur said “why am I trying to live if I am just living to die”.  But can we cheat death?

In my two decades of being on this earth, I have seen men go down the road of death only to be brought back by physicians. I believe that the medical profession, research cosmetics and innovative medicines all attest to the fact that mankind has been cheating death.  From life machines to vaccination man has vastly improve the standard of living. Imagine if it was the sixteen century and swine flu was ravishing the land. The mortality rate would have been innumerable and astounding. 

Man is cheating death through organ transplant surgery. A man who would have died without a new heart can receive someone else’s heart to live by.  A man who would have died otherwise if it was not for cardiac surgeons and the developments in cardiology and surgery.  We are inventing concoctions and machines designed to keep death at bay for another decade or two.

Mankind is discovering ways to stall death and to extend life. In reality mankind is outwitting Mother Nature. But Mother Nature always wins because at the end of the day. We are dead people.  Many men, who suffered from diagnosis of cancer and were, told that they had weeks to live and have lived years after their diagnosis been made.

We cheat death every day.  When we decide to drive with our seat belts on and adhere to the speed limits. When we make decisions that are in our best interest. When we decide to do weight loss surgery in order to counteract heart disease and other defects associated with obesity, we are telling death to hold off. We have a lot more living to do.

At the end of the day, we cannot always cheat death because death will be there waiting for us at the end of life’s journey.  We try not to think about it because it would overwhelm us to an extent that we would just vegetate.  I would not want to become a famous Jamaican writer because I will not live forever and I would be dead and forgotten. I would only want to live until I die. I would not waste my money studying because I could die in the middle of my studies like my friend who was studying medicine and died a week before his graduation and his parents collected his medical certificate. 

Death is lurking. We catch a glimpse of it when we are in a Jamaican taxi and the driver careen the corner missing the incoming trailer by several inches.  We face it when we are diagnosed with terminal illness that could go both ways.  We experience it when a love one dies and we realized that the nexus between life and death is very thin.

So we cannot cheat death because at the end of the day…death always wins!!!