If no one ever died, the word “life” would be meaningless.
It would not even exist.
We only name something when there is also something it is not.
Light means nothing without darkness.
Heat means nothing without cold.
You only know a thing because you have known its opposite.

Pain works the same way.
It is not an isolated experience but the shadow of joy.
If you had never felt pain, joy would have no outline.
It would be like trying to describe “bright” to someone who has never known “dim.”
Pleasure and suffering define each other.
You do not measure one without the other in mind.

Death is that contrast for life.
It sits there, silent, shaping the edges of everything we do.
When you are a child, you think life is the default state, as if it stretches forward without end.
Death is distant, almost imaginary.
But the moment you understand it is real, life changes shape.

That knowledge changes how you value things.
If you had infinite mornings, you might ignore the sunrise.
If you could speak to someone forever, you might never truly listen.
The end is what makes the act of living urgent.

Even in language, this contrast is built in.
We only call something “alive” because there are things that are not.
Take death away, and “alive” is just “being”, without specialness, without edge.
The word collapses.
The concept evaporates.

This is why people who come close to dying often live differently afterward.
It is not the brush with danger alone; it is the clarity of the contrast.
You cannot go back to thinking time is infinite.
You start to feel the tick of the clock in the background of every day.
You stop thinking “someday” is a safe plan.

And it’s not just life and death.
Hunger makes food taste better.
Winter makes you crave warmth.
Loneliness makes love sharper, more vivid.
If you had only one side of the equation, you would not even recognize it as anything at all.

We resist thinking about death because it feels like an enemy.
But it is not an intruder in life.
It is built into the system from the beginning.
Without it, life would be a flat, endless field with no horizon. Nothing to measure against, nothing to push against, nothing to frame the view.

The clock ends for all of us.
That is the fact that makes each tick matter.
Every joy you’ve ever felt has its roots in pain you’ve known.
Every bright moment you’ve ever noticed has been outlined by the shadows before it.
And every heartbeat you have is shaped, whether you admit it or not, by the truth that one day it will stop.

Life is not in spite of death.
It is because of it.