I am going to die.

And so will you.

In the next several decades, every one of Earth's 6.6 billion plus people will perish.

Some will meet their end quietly in old age in a retirement home. Others will come to their demise in a car crash or a war or a murder or a freak accident that occurs only a few times a decade.

Others will succumb to slow-growing or fast-spreading diseases or gun-shot wounds or their heart will simply decide it's pumped long enough and doesn't want to any more.

Lightning will send about 50 of us in this country this year into the afterlife. The weather phenomenon kills more people than tornadoes and hurricanes.

Because of savvy attorneys and accountants, taxes aren't nearly as guaranteed as death. We can even track death at www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.htm by the day, week, month and year and learn how many of us have been afflicted with cancer, were aborted, drowned, poisoned or killed by fire or malaria and leprosy.

We will all die, and we all know it. Yet we teach each other to pretend as though we can do something about it and are shocked when it knocks on our door.

Just because it hurts - immensely - to lose a loved one doesn't make death bad or morbid, though that's the way we treat it.

The government even keeps track of "preventable deaths" - tobacco use, obesity and microbial agents are among the causes - as though there is such a thing.

We are instituting bans of all sorts. Medical professionals pump out advice daily about how much we should weigh and what we should eat to cheat death.

We don't want to face the obvious, that death is more intrinsically linked to life than love and hate. We'd rather ignore the requisite mourning and uncertainty death brings, even while knowing that no matter the technological advances, we haven't figured out a way to sidestep them.

Death stifles us, persuades us to put reality on hold. If a scroundel dies, he is spoken of like a saint out of "respect for the dead," or his sins are muted until a more appropriate time. If a mother loses a son in combat - Cindy Sheehan - her words become more deserving of being heard than everyone else's.

In those moments, our hurts and pains become bigger and more important than everything else when, instead, we should simply love harder today because we aren't promised tomorrow.

We must spend less time trying to ignore death and more time cherishing life.

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on MyrtleBeachOnline.com