Do you guys ever think about dying?

It's a matter of Life and Death.

I finally watched Barbie this weekend. I’m still processing my thoughts around it, so perhaps the movie review will have to wait for another Monologue. But there’s a moment, early on, where Barbie pauses her pink plastic universe to wonder aloud, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” The disco ball stops spinning, Barbie Land screeches to a halt. Margot Robbie’s character abashedly sweeps the thought aside so that the celebration can continue.

In this film, Death is the furthest point from powder puff positivity, a sobering splash of reality that jars one awake. I can see why Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach articulated this stray curiosity as Barbie’s schism into her Hero’s Journey. In the real world — a very very real world — rife with guns, UFOs, AI doom, and climate apocalypse, Death has become inconveniently omnipresent. Even its box office challenger, Oppenheimer, is a film about designing the darkest, most evil Death.

How can we not think about dying? It’s permeated our hourly culture: riddled throughout our social media feeds, plastered across entertainment headlines. It’s like the Obituary section is the front page of the newspaper. Statistically, I’m unsure if there is more Death or less Death or the equal amount of Death, but I do know that we are aware of more people than we’ve ever been in history. Because we are keyed into a million more lives in our networks, updated on their break-ups and political takes and workout regimens, we’re hyper-attuned to their deaths as well (You may feel like everybody is dying; yet, we so easily overlook how many people we follow are alive and faring fine).

Yesterday morning, Pee Wee Herman died. For my generation, he was a real-life cartoon, visiting us from his playhouse on Saturday mornings with his rubber band ball and Cowboy Curtis. And then, just hours later, we received the unfortunate news that Euphoria star Angus Cloud - a friend of The Hundreds - had also passed (RIP to the realest one). It’s midnight as I write this on a balmy Monday night and I’m still having trouble digesting both of these pieces of information. I haven’t even made it through my Sinead O’Connor playlist after her untimely death last week.

My friend John remarked that we’ve reached a generational cliff, that craggy juncture where many of our childhood icons are transitioning beyond. He rattled off a roll call of music icons and movie stars that we’ve said goodbye to in recent years. I just don’t think our brains were ever meant to assimilate this staggering amount of tragedy on a daily basis. We have little room to process and cope with the news. Each passing - whether a close friend or a beloved celebrity - should take a lifetime to absorb. But who’s got the time?

Best practices for mourning are to share some In Memoriam photos on Instagram between beach selfies and kooky memes. It makes Death feel so thin and empty when it should be the most powerful, earth shattering, and meaningful. Its debasement coats our waking world with a milky fog of absurdity. If Death is this trivial and just on the other side of a 1-inch drywall, then what does that say about Life and purpose?

When you isolate Death in a vacuum as the dramatic climax or momentous finale to bring home the Best Life Award - and then you cheapen that conclusion into a Nothing - then I can empathize how everything prior seems pointless. But, what if we reconsider how Death plays a role in our daily living? After all, if you think about it, from the time we are born, we are dying. Death/Life are interchangeable in this way. And they inform and define the other.

I never totally understood what people meant when they said Death is a part of Life. But I think it goes a little something like this: In the book of Life, Death isn’t the summarizing epilogue. It’s not the stirring moral or the closure in the Hero’s Journey. Death doesn’t necessarily import significance or encapsulate the entire story. It’s not a singular incident, relegated to a clump of paragraphs. Death is everywhere - in the main character, the plot, and the arc. Death is the spine and glue that bind the pages together.

“Do you ever think about dying?” Barbie, the truth is that I can’t stop thinking about dying. It is woven into our decisions, it guides our careers, it frames our family time. Death keeps us on track, it holds us accountable, reminds us about what’s most important, and infuses value into the minutes. It adds weight. Urgency. Fire and electricity. We work hard and love hard knowing that none of this will last forever (If we were immortal, our days would become shapeless and aimless). It’s the same as giving it all in a marathon - every muscle activated, no calorie of energy unburned - with the knowing that the finish line awaits. One day, the race will end and the entire saga will make beautiful and harmonious sense, read forwards or backwards or out of order.

Life is propelled by Death’s inspiration and motivation, but it’s undergirded by Death’s seriousness and gravity. It’s the granite bedrock underneath our feet that supports us as we dance, roam, and flourish. It’s the earth we return to when the adventure is sealed. It was there all along and it was us all along. To live and to die.