On Death

Death is a funny thing. It's like magic. We're here. Then poof. We're gone. Imagine what it was like for the first organism to experience death. The amoeba. He must've been like, "Oh shit! Oh shit! I'm... fading away! What the hell is this sensation!? Aaauughhh! Oh Amoeba God, make it stop!" And then, after a fierce protoplasmic death rattle, it's gone. Poof. Magic. Maybe his amoeba buddies gave him a proper burial, dressed him up in a little black outfit and placed him in a tiny casket. Actually, no. They all must've been freaked out. It was the First Death Of Anything Ever. They were probably like, "Dude, what happened to Fred?" as they watched his lifeless single-cell body float off in the primordial ooze, nary a trace of the jubilance and zest for life he once displayed. Maybe they thought it was cool. Maybe they were like, "Wow. Check out Fred. He's all frozen! That's so weird! I want to be dead too! I want to be dead like Fred!" Fred probably started the whole Goth thing. In his wake, he inspired countless other single-cell organisms to be sullen depressives, moping around, wearing little amoeba boots with huge buckles on them, putting on too much mascara and singing Nine Inch Nails songs. So it's all Fred's fault. Fred the Amoeba: Inventor of Goth.
-T.

-taken from sinfest

But however much I cleared away, I was left with great lumps of void, of empty space. Then as time went on, these lumps began to assume a simple form, a form I can transpose into words.

Death exists not as the opposte of life but as a part of it

Pretty ordinary when you put it into words, though for me at the time, this wasn't words but a lump inside me. Inside the paperweights, inside those four red and white balls on the billiard table, death existed. And we, the living, breathed it into our lungs every day like a fine dust.
Up until that point I had always conceived of death as something utterly separate and independent of life. One day we shall surely fall into death's grip, but until the day death comes to claim us, it is we who have death in our grip. Which had seemed quintessential logical stance. Life on this side, death on the other. Me over here, not over there.
Yet the night of Kizuki's death marked a dividing line, and henceforth I could no longer conceive of death (or life) in such simple terms. Death was not the antithesis of life but was already a part of my original makeup, and I couldn't put this truth out of my mind however much I tried. Because the death that claimed Kizuki that night in the May of his seventeenth year also claimed me at the same time.
So the spring of my eighteenth year was spent with that lump of empty space lodged inside me. But at the same time I was struggling not to let it get to me. I didn't want to take it all too seriously because I sensed, however indistinctly, that getting serious was not necessarily synonymous with getting to the truth. Yet death is a serious matter. And so I endlessly pursued that time-honored, circuitous course through the antipodes of an irreconcilable dichotomy. To think of it now, those surely were strange days. There, in the very midst of life, anything and everything revolved around death.

-taken from "Norwegian Wood" by Murakami Haruki