(From a Negro spiritual, part of the outstanding musical soundtrack of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?")

We should always think about death: our own, in the first place, needless to say; but also that of all the sentient creatures whom we meet; especially of the human beings, who we must assume experience the same feelings of dread, more or less frequent, that we ourselves feel.

Many people who are Catholics, by no means the majority of Catholics I think, but I do not know the numbers, pray a devotion to God and the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, connected to a strand of beads called the Rosary.  The most often recited prayer, the Ave Maria ("Hail Mary"), concludes: "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death."

(The first part of that prayer quotes the Archangel Gabriel's greeting to Mary, then that of her cousin Elizabeth, then names the name "Jesus."  It is a magnificent little poem; but I dislike the use of the word "sinners" in the latter half, with its implicit presumption that I, the chiefest of sinners, am in a position to judge all the rest of you to be sinners.)

My usual concerns in this environmentalist blog are animal welfare and animal rights.  But this is a well-deserved, totally defensible anthropocentric concern: the fear of death, in the abstract, which definitely haunts thoughtful human beings, but presumably not non-human animals.  (???)

From a non-biblical tradition, we might also read Plato's Phaedo (philosophy is the preparation for death!); the Bhagavad Gita; the Epic of Gilgamesh, most difficult of all.

And now, rather easier, the Christianoid conclusion of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, in light of what happens in it, in which the sexual orientation of Albus Dumbledore seems a very minor detail indeed.

So: When you get into your car, should you think about the possibility of your dying as a result?  Yes.  But so should you at every hour of the day, at every change from one state of being to another, at every passage through a portal, at every movement of a cloud, at every visit to the bathroom, at every visitation by a bug.

It has nothing to do with statistics.  When we fly, we may indeed imagine our unspeakably horrible death (as I inevitably do), over (or, worse, into) the Atlantic Ocean.  But, with respect to the statistics, we are very safe -- not perfectly, never perfectly, but very very very.

It would do us better to think about how our travel contributes to the deaths of others -- because we should always be thinking about the deaths of others.

And we should always give reverence to the fear of death that all of us human animals share.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.