Imagine

Why does death horrify us? I just drove by a dead deer on the side of the road. It was hit by a car, but the car must have just clipped it, because the body was intact, just a bit twisted. Its head was upturned, black eyes staring up at sunny blue skies, its body limp with indifference. The sight of the creature stirred something inside me that was strong and visceral; a mix of terror, revulsion, pity, sadness. The weightless, falling feeling of a rollercoaster hit me in the heart and rolled down through the veins in my arms, falling out from my fingers. The look on its face - like it might be sleeping - was marred by the cold stoicism of death, that irreversable rigid lissomeness hanging around it like spider's silk. The juxtaposition of an idyllic day and a dead deer had a hideous nightmarish quality to it.

Why, I asked myself. Not why did it die - that much I could tell. But why did the scene startle me as it did? Had I not seen dead animals before? Birds, cats, opossums, racoons, other deer. I think we all shrink from death, to varying degrees, but when death inhabits that which doesn't appear dead, it puts emphasis on the thin, frail pedestal life stands on. It is what we see in the mirror at our most desolate, lonely and forsaken; in our most fragile moments. There is a biological component, also. To see a dead thing signifies that which killed it may, at present, remain. It smells of lurking danger. It forces examination; the realization that you are at this moment alive, but soon, may not be. There is a cold communion we share with dead eyes, an accursed, unassailable understanding.

If eyes truly are a window to the soul, passageways connecting one set to another, then to behold it in another is to feel it in yourself.

A witty friend employed his brevity to bestow an answer - death horrifies us because we can imagine. Yeah, that seems true. Because we can imagine what, though?

A painful death, or a life without pain?