The Postmortal

by Drew Magary

Death is what makes us humble before God—knowing that our lives will come to an end and that when that end arrives we will be forced to answer for them. If we answer not to Him, to whom do we answer? Death is the only thing keeping us in line.”

This is bereavement: the slow, eventual reassertion of your own meaningless preoccupations.

“But that’s what marriage is. It’s two people saying that we don’t know what’s going to happen but we promise we’ll get through it together. Being married means there’s one thing you can always count on.”

How can you be a success or have a legacy if your career—nay, your entire life—has no definitive story arc?”

If douchebags are useful for anything, it’s performing brainless displays of strength to impress everyone else around.

Nobility sounds wonderful as a concept. But nobility tends to go out the window when you find yourself forced to choose between life and oblivion.

But wishing is a fool’s errand, isn’t it? There’s only one reality, and that’s the reality that I have to deal with. I think a lot of people mistakenly hoped the cure would end not only death but also the anguish of processing death, of processing finality. I think people thought they would be able to escape that, and the opposite has proven true. They have to spend much longer dealing with their grief.

You can’t stop people from doing what they want to do. They’re always going to do it. Mankind has a path for itself, a trajectory, and you can never knock it off of that course.

You cannot hide from the world. It will find you. It always does. And now it has found me. My split second of immortality is over. All that’s left now is the end, which is all any of us ever has.