What is the price of life?  For some, it is death.  " . . . Somewhere up here, in that vast wilderness of ice and rock, were two still forms.  Yesterday, with all the vigour and will of perfect manhood, they were playing a great game--their life's desire.  Today, it is over, and they had gone, without their ever knowing the beginnings of decay.  Could any man desire a better end?"
     So opined, as recorded in Wade Davis's masterful Into the Silence, his chronicle of the early twentieth century British Empire's attempts to climb Mt. Everest, one of the members of the nation's 1924 expedition to the mountain, thinking about his fellow climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, who earlier that day had evidently perished high up on the slopes of the peak.  Perhaps best known from his famous retort, when asked why he climbed a mountain, "Because it is there," George Mallory was Britain's finest climber of the era, lithe, competent, visionary, and utterly fearless.  Everest was his life long dream, the goal that drove all others.  He lived to climb it.
     He also died, living to climb it.  Yet as his companion observed, Mallory died in his prime, died, as his companion put it, "playing a great game--[his] life's desire . . . without ever knowing the beginnings of decay."  Mallory died before life could die with him.  Though death became, as it does all of us, his final master, it came before it could undermine the sense of life so dear to him.
     Some us are like Mallory.  We want to die before, as the Who put it in My Generation, we "get old," to die in the midst of a rich and fulfilling life, prior to bodily decay.  Others of us want to live as long as we can, regardless.  Yet if there is nothing after this life, either choice falls into an unspeakable nothingness:  it matters, but does it, really?  We come, we go, our desires a game that's over.
     Maybe life's decay--or its early demise--tells us that life is more than life itself.  Maybe life's decay, its essential rhythm of birth and death, speaks to a richer truth:  life cannot be life unless there is a greater life beyond it.  Where would it be?
     Otherwise, yes, the price of life is death--and death.  And who really thinks he or she can live with that?