Can We Cheat Death?

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!!!