We die only once, and for such a long time!

Every morning when I drive into Langa the head line posters from The Daily Sun are flashed in front of my eyes. They're attached to trees and street lamps and the message is always the same; death, death, death; “Teen girl's dead body found in bag” “Pupil guns down alleged bully” “Baby infant chopped to pieces”. This newspaper is indeed one of the noisiest in South Africa and like any other bill with head lines the purpose is to draw attention. Still, I can tell that I'm raised in another culture where death more or less has been put aside.

When I first came to Project Playground, one of our employees just survived a gun attack. I was chocked. One month later a man that used to help us with transportation was killed on the street. No motives, no questions. The week after a baby was found in a trash can with a chopped head, and yesterday it was time again. A boy that attended one of our classes in the past was stabbed to death by a working college in Langa. They had an argument and a fist fight over something. But that wasn't enough. When the boy was walking home afterwards he was attacked from behind by his college and stabbed deadly in his 19 year old heart.

I'm not used to this confrontation with death. Not at all. Most people that I know are terrified of dying, and I guess I am too. Thinking about death is for me similar as to looking at the sun; I can only do it for a couple of seconds and then I have to turn my eyes away. I get confused and then I have to think about something different. Everything else than short moments is unbearable. I have learned to always focus on life and leave the rest to the future, but I realize that this is something that not everyone can do. In fact, this might as well be very dangerous, because sooner or later we will all be confronted, and then we might stand or lie there without any idea how to handle it, because death is unpredictable and something that we all can count on. For me it's still something unimaginable. I can't imagine not existing. The thought. The void. The silence. How come it's so hard to accept a world without me in the future, when I can understand the world existing without me before I was born?

I believe that death more or less has been put aside by the Swedish society. At least for my generation that no longer have an institution or sacred place where it's possible to get exposed to existential thoughts and anxiety. Most people have probably attended a funeral once, but it was most likely an old relative that died a natural death because of age or any of our modern diseases. But here, in Langa, death is more than that. Death is normal and something that you can't deny. Some people from home and even in South Africa tell me that life has a different meaning and a different value here than in Sweden, but for me, every life serves the same purpose no matter where and who you are. We get born and then we die. That's it. This is all we know and the rest is only speculations. We are all given one life and the intrinsic value of that is to be alive. That boy had one life yesterday and today he has none. Just like Moliere said it; “On ne meurt qu'une fois; et c'est pour si longtemps! - We die only once, and for such a long time!”

Death is something extremely mysterious for me, and is something that in contrast to life can be taken for granted. Life is not working without death, they're part of the same circle, the same phenomena, and if I choose to deny death, then I also choose to deny life. I understand that death is a fundamental condition for the existence of life, but at the same time there is a paradox existing that I can't seem to solve in this age and at this stage, and that is that life is also driven by death. Death drives us to create love and belonging, and this is why it's so much harder to die. I have to die from everything that I once created and be separated from everything I love.

This thought is making me very vulnerable.