The day death lost its sting

I know of nothing that inspires optimism more than Easter; the resurrection of Jesus - the day humanity's greatest enemy, death, lost its sting.

Years ago, I lived with medics that turned their home into a clinic because there was none in the neighbourhood. Once or twice a week, someone in critical condition would be ferried in mostly on a stretcher.

O grave where is thy victory?

I was a keen boy that secretly watched the terrors of day and night as men and women fought long for their lives. The battle often involved kicking and heaving and jerking and guttural groaning and the white part in the eye exerting its prominence oddly while foam popped from somewhere to wreath the mouth. Then the grim reaper would finally win, and silence, as sobering as I can feel it even now, ensued shortly before it was cut through with wailing and screams of grief from the relatives of the departed.

Weeks on end, I had trouble sleeping as episodes of the dying man obstinately replayed in my mind leaving me with unspeakable fright. I didn't want to die like men I had watched die yet I knew that one day whether I liked it or not, death and I would have to confront each other. Sometimes I would see an ugly creature with a pointed forehead written on "death" in capital letters coming for me in the dark and I would jump up with a scream of terror.

When I discovered much later that one of the authors I read as an adolescent, Steven King, was as well terrified and fascinated by death so much that he was convinced he would not live beyond the age of 20, I was relieved. And at the university, I heard an Easter sermon based on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and inspired by 1 Corinthians 15, titled, "Death, where is your sting?" in which the preacher argued that for believers, death is just a harmless shadow, and a path to eternal bliss, since Christ conquered it when he rose from the grave three days after burial.

The optimist was fascinated; his fears vanished once and for all. I have since had great times mocking death with these beautiful lines from English poet Alexander Pope: "O grave! where is thy victory?/ O death! where is thy sting?"