I don't fear death, for some time now I've accepted that one day sooner or later I'm going to kick the proverbial bucket and there's nothing I can do about it.
Now this doesn't mean I want to die, or that I'd put myself in a position that will greatly increase the likelihood of me dying, but the fact I'll be dead some day doesn't haunt me. Maybe this fear will come back one day when I am significantly closer to death, I'm in my 20s after all, my frontal cortex hasn't fully developed so that could be playing a factor. It's also not a profound position to hold, there are plenty of reasons to fear death, but you can't let things you can't control eat you up inside, you'll be a very unhappy person if you do so.
I hadn't realized the benefits of accepting death until earlier this year. Our 96 year old neighbor Susan had passed away. She was a sweet woman in the few interactions we shared with her. Roomie and I got her a birthday card for her last birthday and she told us it made her day. When we got the news that she had passed, Roomie was really shaken. In hindsight I should have tried comforting him more, but to me her passing was not truly saddening. I hope that doesn't come off as cold or sociopathic. I completely understand why someone would be sad, but I see it differently. She had lived a full life, in all likelihood she had accomplished everything she was going to accomplish. She wasn't very mobile so she couldn't explore all of the beauty of our world. The story of her life merely ended, as all stories do. So when I heard the news of her passing I was disappointed I'd never get to wave to her again, but happy she didn't live through the pain and agony of the worst parts of the end of life. My own grandmother was forced through that, they kept trying to keep her alive, but for what reason? Her cancer was terminal, there was no way she could get better, one of the last things she said to my father was "Why can't they just let me die". Susan even had made a joke about dying soon, I don't remember the specifics of what she said but it was quite humorous, in a morbid sense.
Roomie is greatly affected by death and aging. He lost his childhood dog earlier this year as well. It's been a rough year of loss for him. We were talking about aging the other day, he mentioned seeing an old man struggle with opening his car while Roomie was at work. He said it shook him that someday he's going to be like that, and someday he will die. I understand his point of view, not being able to do what you once could with ease is certainly not something I'm looking forward to, but to me it really makes me grateful for the youth that has been given to me. It inspires me to do what I can while I can do it, since as far as I know it could be my last day tomorrow. Of course I don't always live by this and part of me regrets how I spent my time as a teenager, but in general it keeps me from dwelling on it. I can't change the past, I can only learn from it.
Likewise you can't stop yourself from growing old. You can certainly take care of yourself as to not expedite the aging process but to stop it outright is impossible. That's one reason I don't understand why some people yearn for a youthful beauty many years after it has left them. People going through procedures to attempt to regain their lost youth almost always end up looking bizarre. Those women whose faces are more botox than tissue may look far younger than their real age, but can fall into the uncanny valley. One should rather try to accept their aging body and find a new, older beauty. 50 year old men and women aren't held to the same standards as 20 and 30 year olds for just about every other standard, why should we hold them to same standards of beauty? There is beauty in the middle-aged man with graying hair, with hands scarred from years of work, with a replaced knee from getting tackled too many times during his long past years of the high school football team. There is beauty in a middle-aged woman, with crows' feet growing from the corner of her eyes, with arms that sag when she raises them, with regular visits to the doctor to see if the new growth is benign. Aging is a part of life and one shouldn't run from it. Not to mention there is a certain ugliness to attempting to look and act younger than you are. Nobody wants a sexy grandma.
Death and aging being negative are a key assumption of vegetarianism. Note that I include veganism as a subset of vegetarianism, not its own separate group. This negative association of death and aging is even outrightly shown with many of its proponents pointing to clearer skin and other visual aspects of a youthful complexion being a supposed health benefit of vegetarianism, though this is more so the vegan camp. Most everyone agrees that the current state of factory farming is cruel, I'm certainly not endorsing that, but many activists characterize the entire idea of killing an animal for meat or using its products as cruel. Is it cruel when a cat catches a mouse? They don't even kill it quickly, they toy with their prey until they lose interest with it, only then deciding to eat it. No it is not, these two animals are merely living out the process of life, predator and prey. For almost every animal on this earth besides humans and the animals we have domesticated, they will die either of sickness or in a brutal and terrifying encounter with a predator. This is life. This is way things have been for millions of years. Any attempt to stop this process is akin to trying to stop yourself from aging. There is the same ugliness of attempting to hold onto the first, beautiful, youthful portion of life, but denying its subsequent portions. If vegetarianism became widespread among society and the practice of eating meat ended, it would be an ecological disaster. Freeing cattle to roam free without any natural predators would destroy local ecosystems. It would mean the death of more animals, not less. Vegetarianism is the sexy grandma of attitudes towards animals.
We must accept the beauty that comes with the process of death, and historically we have. We should treat meat with greater reverence than we currently do. One major cause of the growing prevalence of vegetarianism is that people are divorced from the process of raising livestock. Their only interaction with animals are as pets. They haven't experienced raising an animal knowing that it will become food. There is a popular myth among people that animals are in some way stupid and that makes it ok to eat them. While livestock are certainly not rocket scientists, idiots they are not. So when a person then sees a video of one of these animals showing their intelligence, this reminds them of a cute interaction with a pet. Associating these animals with pets influences them towards vegetarianism. Once they see the youthful beauty of the animal, they desire to preserve it. This myth is foolish, if the deciding factor of eating something is its intelligence then why don't we eat those who have suffered from brain injuries? In reality we eat meat because it is extremely nutritious. One pound of animal protein is not only more calorically dense than its plant counterpart, but also far easier for our bodies to process. We are omnivores, not herbivores or carnivores, eating only one thing is not beneficial for our bodies. We have adapted over thousands of years to eat a mix of the two. These animals have given us their lives for sustenance in ours. This is what makes factory farming so evil, treating these beautiful creatures with such disrespect only for them to be ground into fine pastes and shoveled down the gullet of an uncaring consumer in the form of a Big Mac.
There is beauty in the process of life, attempting to halt at a certain step of the process is impossible and reflects an inner ugliness and lack of understanding. We should instead find the beauty in each step and recognize and embrace the transition to it. We should not fear what we can not change.