Often at the funerals of young people, suicides, and sudden deaths the eulogists speak of wasted potential, unfulfilled dreams, a life incomplete. This I do not understand. Does a corpse dream? Does a pile of ashes have any more obligations to fulfill? Can a dead body, if properly motivated, be convinced to get up and achieve? No. When a life is over, it is over, complete. With death, however unexpected, comes the cessation of all dreams, the end to all aspirations, the loss of all potential. A body without potential has nothing left to waste. A cadaver is not lazy, cannot be accused of selfishness or squandered talent. It is only those who are still living that those terms can apply to.
People alive, people with talents and power, people: lawyers and politicians, doctors and clergymen, businesswomen and billionaires. It would be far more appropriate to draft speeches on wasted potential for them, and not the dead. So many, far too many, people have been corrupted by greed and hatred, have let their selfishness and bigotry delude them into thinking that they are the only ones worth saving, never grasping how interconnected all life truly is. These people have a beautiful gift and a great responsibility to their fellows, a job to do in the service of all: not just for other's gratification, but for their own as well. Those that choose greed over selflessness live small lives, lives of unfulfilled dreams. Those that shun compassion find their souls lacking, incomplete. For these misers death is the only consolation, for only in death will they finally be blameless.
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