One of my top ten movies is What About Bob? In one scene, Bob and Sigmund (or Siggy) are in Siggy’s room having a sleep-over. Bob is a middle-aged neurotic guy who is afraid of everything, and Siggy is a pretty disturbed pre-teen who wears all black and is obsessed with death.
So while they are laying there trying to fall asleep, Siggy asks Bob, “Did you ever think about it? You’re going to die. You. Are. Going. To. Die. We’re all going to die.” And then Siggy says, because Bob is much older than him, “And you are going to die much sooner than me, of course.”
Because Bob is deathly afraid of everything, you expect this to have a crumbling effect on him. But actually, it does the opposite. He decides, in a moment of clarity, that if death is the worst end of it, then maybe everything else isn’t so bad.
Siggy’s right, of course; we’re all going to die. All of us. In a way, Easter is the holiday that celebrates this fact. Easter is that kid laying in bed in the dark, saying, “You’re going to die. We’re all going to die.”
And then Easter asks, ‘What are you going to do about it?”
