He had to starve to death. Because we will acknowledge that death is to happen, but we lack the conviction of its finality. Is it hope or cowardice to see an end, but be unwilling to hasten to it? We play semantic games such that the ugliness of culpability doesn't stain our fingers, such that we never have to dirty our hands with the acrid soil of death. The difference between allowing someone to die, and helping them to, is a small measure of courage. All our talk about wills of gods is a smoke screen to hide the banging fear in our hearts. Such talk never accompanies miracles of life, never accompanies the surgeon cutting out the delicate black ropes of cancer from a child's trembling body. It never accompanies the needles that shield us from the ravages of disease. Only in death is God's true hand allowed to be seen, it's cruel talons ripping, only enough to allow pain to nestle tightly against time.
The final moments looped in a haze of our idea of comfort, an end mired in the nebulous numb of drugs. Is it comfortable to release your last breath unaware, to forgo lucidity for extra minutes, extra days in which time floats by like refuse on a river? Is it comfortable to forget your own song, the verses of your life nothing but tricks of shadow, images just beyond thought? Is it comfortable to creep through the gates of the beyond on the dissolved remnants of who you once were?
For all our humanity, we cruelly torture the last moments of life, and let the scorching remains of what could be reflection, die mercilessly.
He had to starve to death.