What exactly is the significance of a “death date?” When a person becomes dead longer than they were alive. For example, John Lennon was forty years-old when he was murderer in 1980; his “death date” was in 2020, when he passed forty years dead.
Is it significant because once that death date passes, the decedent then has stronger ties to the afterlife than they do to life?
Is it that it’s like a birthday of sorts, only a deathday— to be absolutely specific— and we naturally feel the pull to notice?
Or maybe this one of those concepts that is so simple and obvious that I am overlooking an easy answer?
Not sure, on any counts.
To conclude: if you live to the ripe old age of 80, let’s say, and you pass later this year, at 10:54:03pm on December 3 (‘24), your deathday would come at 10:54:04pm (or whatever the microseconds worked out to be) on December 3, 2104, the moment you are dead longer than you were alive.
But why is this significant? It feels significant at the instinctual level, like its significance is “hard-wired” into the brain.
Maybe it’s because once our deathday comes, people start forgetting us, our “things,” our faces? Shudder.
It’s like an itch that you just can’t quite reach…
They say it's your deathly
Well, it's my deathly too, yeah
They say it's your deathday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your deathday
Happy deathday to you.
"(Bastardized) Birthday," The Beatles
© Ray Cattie
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