I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently. It’s September, one of those months that seems to carry an anniversary every year, an event from the past resurfacing right on schedule. This year marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11, one of the most devastating events of modern history. Since the start of the month, there have been tributes, old photos and videos resurfacing, documentary clips and scenes, and no shortage of tears.
It’s the kind of anniversary that has you spiraling a little, in tears, thinking about children who lose a parent too soon, about natural disasters that wipe out entire bloodlines in a moment. But it also raises a question I hadn’t really sat with before: what is premature death, exactly? Is it an infant passing away? A father dying before his children reach puberty? A young man hit by a car?
Here’s the thing: Adam and Eve were never supposed to die at all. So when you trace it back far enough, “premature” death is really something we’ve made up, a comparison that only exists once we assume a life could have gone on longer. Nobody calls it premature when someone dies at 100. But then you hear about someone like Jeanne Calment, who lived to 122, and the goalposts move again. Someone dies at 90 and we call it a full life. Someone else dies at 60 and we call it too soon. Both numbers are only “enough” or “not enough” compared to some ceiling we’ve decided on, and that ceiling keeps moving.
That’s usually where the harder question shows up: we talk about suffering, and why would God let this happen? But God didn’t. Death itself was never His design, it entered through a choice made in a garden, not through anything He authored. Premature death, in that sense, doesn’t really exist, not the way we think of it. There is just death, the one consequence of the one choice, and this kind of loss would never have been apparent to us at all had a different choice been made.
So this September, as the tributes play and the tears come, I’m holding both things at once: the grief is real, and so is the truth that none of this was ever the plan. Death was never supposed to be part of the story at all.
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