Capes, you said something about the story of Black Beauty which I found extremely illuminating, and true. You said about this tragic horse story that
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On rereading it at an older age, I realised that death wasn't the point.
Even though the story ends tragically, the tragic ending isn't the point of it. You will forgive me for saying that this is a piece of totally amazing wisdom.

People, I'm fifty years old. In a few months I'll be fifty-one. It's overwhelmingly probable that I have lived more than half of my life already.

Now let's do a bit more calculating. Astronomers believe that the universe is around fourteen billion years old. For all but fifty of those fourteen billion years, I didn't exist. In less than fifty years, I won't exist again. But the universe will go on and on, for an untold number of billion years.

People, just try to imagine the eons before me when I didn't exist, and the eons after me when I won't exist, either! It would be easy to say that I'm totally inconsequential, and in so many ways that would be absolutely true, too.

But this is what I believe. The point about us humans is not that we are inevitably going to die, or that our lives, from a cosmic perspective, are so unbelievably short. Heck, they are short even from a human point of view - do I vividly remember being seventeen, when it seemed impossible that I could ever become middle-aged, or old.

No, this is the point. The miracle about us humans is our lives. We live. For a very short time - some of us live so briefly that we never even become truly aware of our own existence. Others live more than a century, which is still very nearly nothing from a cosmic perspective. Still all our lives are miracles.

A friend of mine became pregnant after many years of trying to conceive a child. Just a week before she was expected to give birth, her little baby son got so tangled up in the umbilical cord that he got strangled while still inside his mother's body. He was stillborn, of course, but he was perfectly formed, a beautiful little boy. He never made it alive outside the amniotic fluid of the womb. But I know my friend sang and talked to him to him while she was expecting him. We have every reason to believe he heard and reacted to her voice. He rolled and kicked inside her womb. He had his own kind of awareness, and he was a living miracle inside the universe of his mother. He just got a shorter time to live than most of us.

The point is not that we all must die, or that we live such brief lives. The point and the miracle is that we live at all. I want the stories I read to celebrate that life. That doesn't mean that these stories can't acknowledge the fact that our lives will inevitably come to an end. They can indeed tell us that, and even detail the story of the main character's death. The stories can do that and still celebrate life, still make us see that the important thing wasn't the deaths, but the lives.

Stories that leave us with a sense of hopelessness and despair have failed to celebrate our lives, I think. And stories that get caught up in death without looking ahead, without giving us a suggestion as to what we could do to help those who are still alive, they just wallow in death, I think.

Ann