Termination of a dream.

Often it is only in moments of great loss do we truly consider our own lives and the fickle nature of this life we lead.
The Buddhists call it "impermanence", and warn against the natural conclusion that our lives somehow have a sense of permanence into which we project our very existence, setting the rules by which we live and the dreams which fulfil us.
Death, especially the death of a young person seems so meaningless, the meaning being in the loss of potential of the person who has died as well as our own lost opportunity to engage in it.
Life at least in the West has a path and a time scale. There is no reason to doubt our implicit belief in the continuation, each day following the last, each triumph and disaster enacted within the prism of a life cycle which is taken for granted. There is little else to expect, but that we grow old, hopefully without pain, without becoming an invalid perhaps with some success, perhaps with a little love but that our time is a given we assume to be fact.
Why do the young die. I am not talking about accidental death but death from seemingly natural causes. In the very question lies the answer of course. we question an early death because we do not question life its self. We are engrossed in the daily "activity" of living, each event proceeding the last like a chain that is joined together. Stretching behind and in front, or at least we presume so and of course we have a right to do so except that there is no surety and, in retrospect we should re-examine our presumption, minute by minute.
Of course life would be unbearable if we thought along these lines but in their philosophical way Buddhists  abstract ourselves as individuals and establish themselves as part of the human condition, they accentuate the importance of disengaging from our tendency to project into the future, of losing  ourselves in believing that each day is owned by us,  that each month, each year is 'in the bank' for us to spend at our leisure and pleasure. Their investigation reveals a hidden self, hidden under the fold of desire and acquisition of envy much of it based on the assumption that there is time and there are things which we don't have but which having would make us happier.
Death explodes all this with its finality, with its blunt termination of the dream.           

http://twocents2012.blogspot.com.au/