I recently had the most proximate experience with roadkill that I have ever had.
The dog must have been hit a car just two or three cars ahead of me. His entrails lay in a fresh heap on the freeway and I was able to safely swerve but no one ahead of me seemed to do the same, which lead me to believe it had to have been one of them.
I'll never get used to it. I'll never be unaffected by the sight of a dead animal on the road.
Death should affect us. Whether it is an animal or a person, death should prompt us to appreciate life and acknowledge our mortality. After all, death is coming for all of us.
Death worries me and fascinates me and preoccupies me and kinda scares me. A defense mechanism developed after experiencing traumatic deaths in my life, is that I consider every day that it might be my last day. I at once anticipate it, and fear it. I don't want to die yet, but experience tells me that death is indiscriminate.
I feel confident that there is a life after death, but occasionally I wonder if I'm wrong about that.
More frequently, I worry that I haven't done enough to earn life after death. And I know that, whether I have or haven't, I won't know it until I am dead. Which really freaks me out.
In my boundless interest with death, I find Good Friday to be one of my favorite days of the liturgical year. Christ died, even though he didn't want to, and even though he didn't have to. He chose to die, even while asking if that really was the only way for his mission to be accomplished. That fascinates me, too, and humbles me, and makes me so incredibly sorry for all of my wrongs. For the small ones and especially for the big ones.
A lot of people find that the devil's attempts to derail their faith increase during Lent. I find the opposite to be true, that my faith automatically grows stronger and vascilates less in this time. I never have more faith in Christ than when I consider His death.
When someone I know dies, I always find myself struck by the realization that I will never see them again on this earth. It's a huge concept to wrap your mind around, and a strange one. They were here, and now they are not.
Every Good Friday, I find struck by the idea that one moment Jesus was here, alive one moment, and then dead the next. I allow myself to be burdened by His crucifixion, to think about it, to grieve it, to walk under the weight of that wood. I don't deserve His sacrifice, and meditating on it seems like the least I can do. It was an excruciating, humiliating death that his mother and closest friends had to watch. And He chose it for me, personally. And for you, personally. For each of us, personally. We each matter to him.
Death should affect us, because each of our lives have effect. We each change the world by being in it, and the world is a different place the moment we are gone.