Life, thus death? Pleaure, thus suffering?

A person I was acquainted with died yesterday. We were at college together, but he was older than me by a few years. He was married, with two young children. Coming from lower middle class roots, he had carved a reasonably comfortable life for himself and his family. Though we had not been in touch over the last two years, I remember him as a jovial, kind and generous man, unpretentious.and simple in his ways. He was flawed, like all of us, but he was neither unaware nor very uneasy about his simple flaws. He never seemed to aspire for perfection or some towering moral standards; he was just happy being good enough. He was not trying to change the world; he was just happy raising his family. He was, in most ways, a normal man. One could say he deserved a normal life, and a normal death. His death was anything but normal. He perished in a road accident, while on a regular bike journey back from a nearby town. Death came to him, unannounced, unexpected, not like insistent humming in the background but like a leaping tiger. I don't know how to react to such instances, what to think, how to interpret, if at all. The arbitrariness is overwhelming. Our desire for and expectation of order, linearity and predictability is eternally disappointed by the ruthless randomness of reality. If death was the price of life, a payment that must be made after one has gone through a full experience, it would have made some sense. But, what about this arbitrary demise? Death is natural, necessary and universal, but when it happens arbitrarily, it deserves to be questioned. The problem is with the seemingly random and untimely death, the fundamental ineluctability about such a fate, and the suffering it entails for the living.

Death itself is nothing. A great deal of suffering originates from the fear of death for ourselves and for our loved ones, and from the death of our loved ones. Basically, it's random, untimely death, and unexplainable suffering for us the living that has puzzled me most. Suffering is for all of us, with some getting disproportionately high shares, for reasons that are hard to understand. The question is: Why suffering? Some religions link this suffering to our deeds, proposing a causality between our choices, our actions and our well-being. This link justifies some suffering, but doesn't seem to hold when we see a child born with a disorder, suffering throughout his life of 7-8 years, and dying in pain, probably never having stepped out of his bed. Did he actually live? I don't know, may be he did see some pleasures of life, but I feel this is still unfair, and the child couldn't have done anything to deserve the pain that governed much of his life. So some religions, like mine, argue about multiple lives and having to expiate for sins of past life, soul being eternal and body being like a cloth, which can be and is changed when we die and proceed to the next life. Though this argument helps explain something, it is not comforting in any way. What is the point of me expiating for the crimes I don't remember I committed? This is a Kafkaesque nightmare that doesn't seem to lead to any meaningful remorse that could have been possible if one were aware of the true reasons for one's sufferings and had a sense of responsibility towards them.

I struggle with these questions, but now with little hope of finding satisfactory answers in religion. I am reminded of what Camus wrote in The Plague: "Since the order of world is regulated by death, perhaps it is better for God we do not believe in him and we fight with all our might against death, without raising our eyes heavenward where he keeps silent.". Perhaps we could expand the statement by considering 'suffering' alongside 'death', to define what regulates us and what we need to put up a million fights against, together as humans. We couldn't do anything to prevent the death of our friend, but perhaps we could do something to alleviate the suffering of his family, and work in our own humble ways to prevent more people from dying like this. Though the answer to the question of causation behind such random death and suffering can't be found easily, we can still find some hope and solace in our efforts to alleviate pain and suffering for the living, and in our endless fight against untimely death for anybody. Perhaps humanness is our only salvation and our only hope, no matter how naive this hope and how modest and easily destructible the results of our efforts may be.