In a recent interview, Larry Ellison, America's Cup winner, technology magnate, and one of the richest people in the United States, said that, "Death makes me very angry.  It doesn't make any sense." Katherine Kubler Ross, best known for her highly influential dissection of the processes of death, might respond that Ellison is merely encountering the initial stages of the human awareness of death.  In the end, she might add, he will accept it.
     Ellison, however, sees it differently.  He is spending millions of dollars (pocket change to him) to develop ways to sustain life indefinitely.  If death is nonsense, he wants no part of it.  A biologist might argue that death is an inevitable, even necessary part of life, for it enables the creation to renew and refresh itself; a theologian might suggest that death is the inevitable result of a sin which has fractured the entire created order and was not originally meant to occur; a psychologist or philosopher might add that death is simply another experience which fuels the richness of the human adventure and that we should not strive to avoid it.  And so on.
     So maybe death is not necessarily nonsense, but rather an experience, an inevitable, even essential experience that can be best understood in the full compass of who we and the universe are.  Few of us want to die, yet almost all of us comprehend that one day we will.  We may not like it, we may abhor it, we may get angry at it, but most of us are reasonable enough to understand that we cannot stop it from happening.
     Would we want to?  I would think that we would want to stop death only if the rest of the cosmos was equipped to deal with an experience of indefinite and undefined existence.  Otherwise, we would be living among people in a universe not always prepared to accommodate us. Eternality and materiality do not always mix well.
     Except once:  in the person of Jesus Christ.  If we are to understand Jesus as he presented himself to be, we understand that he was the eternal born into and living in the temporal.  More than anyone else, Jesus fused that for which we instinctively long (endless life) with that which many of us (particularly Larry Ellison) vehemently hate (death)--and came out the better for it.  But Jesus had to die before he could experience it fully.
     As must we.  Though this may sound like a cliche, I'll say it:  only in death will we see genuine life.  Only in death will we see life as it was meant to be, an eternal existence in an eternal setting, not an endless adventure in a temporal fishbowl.
     It's the most real dream.