The true meaning of death

I had never been in a graveyard until last Friday. Graveyards only appear in Tim Burton movies and are not a part of my reality. I recently had a conversation with a friend who confessed to being terrified of cemeteries at night.

"There are dead people in there!" she said indignantly.

"Oh come on, they can't be any worse than the living," I countered.

In 19 years of life, I have not been touched by death. A great-grand something or other and a second-whatever once remembered have passed into the next world, but as they weren't part of mine to begin with, it made almost no impression on me.

Probably as a result of that, Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. Until now, I've never seen Halloween to be a celebration of death, or a time to reflect upon those who have departed from us.

We have plenty of holidays when we're supposed to think about dead people. On those days, I usually went to the mall and thought about dead people while browsing the Clinique counter. I have had stronger thoughts about lab rabbits wearing lipstick than about living, breathing people who have had an impact on my life passing away.

Halloween, then, was a time to put on a ballet costume, label myself a fairy princess, and knock on the doors of strangers to ask for candy. Where's the doom and gloom in that?

Death was literally the last thing on my mind when I walked into the Burke Museum Saturday to gather information for an article about the new Mummy Madness exhibit. Sure, the whole exhibit was about death, but for someone who has never really lost someone, it's about as instructional as leading a blind person into a bright room and saying, "All right, now you know all about light."

I did my research and talked to the curators and anthropologists and took a tour around the exhibit. I noticed the children mummifying Barbie dolls and designing their own Egyptian tombs with markers and crayons and noted that I was probably as oblivious to the finalities of death as they were.

Death was the last thing on my mind when I went bowling with my friend Kassandra that night. Needless to say, we had a great time, the way old friends who don't see each other often always do when given the opportunity.

Death was the last thing on my mind when I woke up the next morning. Who thinks about death when they wake up, and if they do, why aren't they on Prozac?

And death was the last thing on my mind when I received a message the next morning telling me that Kassandra had been killed in a car accident on her way to work that morning.

I never thought that I would see her dead. In a way, I believed the adage, "You're young, you're cool, you ain't never gonna die." Not for another 10 years, at least -- and then only the stupid and reckless people.

Death is a once-in-a-lifetime event. In some cultures, people prepare for death their whole lives. In our culture, the ever-present quality of death isn't always acknowledged as we try to stuff as much into our lives before the clock runs out.

For me, that has become the true meaning of Halloween -- a way to celebrate our lives before death. Even if we sometimes forget this point, I think that if one abides by another old saying, "Live every day as though it were your last," it's quite possible I would choose to spend my last day in a fairy-princess outfit wandering around the neighborhood asking for candy.