Death is quintessentially relational. As Woody Allen joked: "I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens." He was not speaking lightly. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus said: "If I am, death is not. If Death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can exist only when I do not?" It is not death, but the human fear of it, that invests the end of life with such preposterously heavy meaning. In much the same spirit, the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius remarked: "It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live." The American thinker Benjamin Franklin gave his own dour perspective on that view: "Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75." Hence, according to Ashley Montagu, "The idea is to die young as late as possible." The point, in other words, is to live. That takes some doing. "If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live," Martin Luther King, Jr. averred. How true. And a man fit to live deserves to be loved. "Don't send me flowers when I'm dead," Brian Clough pleaded. "If you like me, send them while I'm alive." Few people are so lucky because life is the time for the heavy lifting. Flowers are for later, when they are quite unnecessary. How complicated.

Death by contrast is simple. It just comes. You do not have to wait for it. You may importune it to come, say if you are suffering and are terminally ill, but it does not come. And just when you do not want to die, it takes you into its coquettish arms. You can give up loving a person, someone can stop loving you, but you cannot stop death from loving you forever once it has selected you for its promised favours. But what is so terrible about all that, if you believe this wonderful quotation by David Gerrold? It goes: "Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order." Incidentally, death happens to other people as well, including your enemies. That is what made Clarence Darrow remark: "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." As for what may happen when one's own obituary appears in the papers (and enemies read it with pleasure), Winston Churchill was ambivalent: "I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter." Indeed, because Churchill was not exactly a nice man. But that is assuming that good and bad are judged finally.

I accept that verdict I principle, but a wit asked wickedly how it was possible for a mortal to know about Heaven and Hell when the living have never been there, and when those in either place cannot return to earth to tell the tale. Hence, logically, it is best to assume that death possesses a terrestrial finality whose transformation in the afterlife (if any) must be the subject of either belief or conjecture. Either or both belief and conjecture could be correct, but the empirical proof of that in this life is missing.

Therefore, I come to the point that interests me the most. I call it "A Happy Death". To me, a happy death is one that occurs when a person has completed his life's work on his own terms, largely at least. The wife has been loved, the children have been brought up, mortgages and debts have long been paid off, long-serving servants rewarded, pardons for wrongs sought and granted, a copy of Tagore's Shesher Kobita lies on the bedside table half completed, the reading lights are dimmed, the wife has fallen asleep, some words of love remain unsaid, another embrace is deferred, the tea next morning will arrive punctually at seven and then ... and then, there is no more now. And now, there is no more then.

Death has become a new measure of happiness. It is only that the dead do not smile or sulk or snarl. Good for them. Good for the living. Death fixes the body in perpetuity till it begins to rot and has to be disposed of. That is chemical. But memories are not chemical. They are more. They are about spouses and children and friends and associates crying their eyes out and beating their chests in woe. Memories are about prayers and fasting and longing. And they are about the bill that arrives dutifully for funeral services performed. For once, someone else has to pay the bill. It is a happy death.

Of course, there are unhappy deaths. People are murdered. They are crushed under the rubber wheels of buses or dissected by the iron wheels of trains. The most stupid of the living (particularly lovers at the receiving end of unrequited love) take their own lives. As if anyone cares, particularly the beloved who sheds a glycerine-tinted tear as part of her make-up for her wedding with the rich man next door. These are unhappy deaths.

But in the case of a happy death, a person ceases to exist. That is all.

But the jokes and the puns and the witticisms will keep coming. They will defy the fear of death.

Most important of all, life will continue. Poems will be written, songs sung. People will fall in love and not commit suicide. Love will be requited. Roads will be safe from speeding buses and trucks, train tracks clear of mortals hurrying across them. And every day, in some part of this wonderful world, a newborn's cry will remind the young, the old and the dying that the world itself was created to sustain life.

Death will become just a part of life.

Enayetullah Khan is Editor-in-Chief at United News of Bangladesh (UNB) and Dhaka Courier.