Undeath

   People often fear what they do not understand. That fear is what has driven us out of the days of survival and into the ages of enlightenment. Fear of the unknown has given us medicine, since we wondered why we ached and fell ill and died. Fear of the unknown gave us a round earth, mathematics, space travel. It's what has made us become more than creatures that live and die and never think about why it is they live, or for what is they live. 

   Unlife, or undeath, is a concept that is the manifestation of our greatest fear, our biggest enemy and our closest friend - Death. Death can be ugly, it can be a child half torn apart and covered in soot under piles of rubble in a war torn country. It can be a man slipping on the ice outside his door, cracking his skull open and dying instantly or a woman sick in her bed, holding on for so many months as she withers away. Death can be romantic, it can be a a woman in silk draped across her bed with a vial of luminous poison clutched to her breast. Death can be valiant, it can be a soldier turning to his comrades on some battlefield, bidding them follow him to their glory, their freedom and maybe their doom.

   Then what is undeath? It is a return to life by those who have perished in those ways above, and more. Of all the ways death manifests itself, it's the one true mystery. Is it forever? Do we feel it? Are we anywhere after it happens? Will we ever be again? We do not know, and so unlife is a kind of escape. For a long time it was regarded as monstrous. The popular opinion of Frankenstein's monster or Dracula or Nosferatu were that they were the embodiment of villainy. When in fact Mary Shelley's original message was overlooked: the monster, the undead being, was not the true villain at all, but rather those that sought to destroy it were. Likewise, vampires have molded into something we can sympathize with, beings who were their anguish on their sleeves, their thirst for blood. Something we connect with on many levels, as we're all victims to vice, to unhealthy desires. And as the world moves on, some things do not change, like the memories of a child passed away, crystallized, turned to stone in one's mind. These things speak to who we are, human beings living in a world that still doesn't care whether we live or die because that's just what nature is. Some day maybe we'll change that.