Head-butting death on some levels can fundamentally shift our views towards the human condition to a more practical level: putrefaction is a natural path to follow by every single living being, and we are not excluded by that.
I once went to pick the body of a deceased family member (further details I must omit); the feverish smell would be felt yards away from the morgue, and the flies, fat as ticks and with a metallic greenish color, would swarm the place in almost every inch of it. The bodies, piles one over another, would rot due lack of resources to store them properly somewhere out of sight in barely underground installations, and the floor, sterilized clean, could not hide the ever increasing decadence of the whole building.
The fact that I was acquainted with death could not prepare me for the horrors of the bureaucratic waiting, and, as it would naturally occur to me, the thoughts would pop up to my head to try to take me somewhere else, but one remained, and was quite prevalent: among the smell of decaying corpses attracting thousand of flies, was the one I went to claim.
The smell of decaying corpses is a quite particular smell that can stuck with you for a lifetime. Not quite sour, not quite acid. Just the right kind of smell that, ingrained on our brains by generations of war, genocide and putrefying diseases, does it's job signaling danger is up ahead.
But not only this thought was present; a further demystification of the human nature was undergoing in my neurons, and the conclusion that would eventually arrive would be my price for having ventured upon the hidden horrors of human society.
"We are nothing but well-behaved animals. And we are all going to die."
The fact that we can understand what it means is of no use, just as we can understand that smoking kills us faster, that drugs are the best thing to trick our biological system and some can give us hell, that driving drunk can be dangerous not only for ourselves.
But not until we headbutt these realities we can grasp them on their full meaning. Not until we fundamentally learn what they mean, we can begin to make peace with such facts of life in a quite personal level. Sometimes, not until you smell death by hours to count, in a vulnerable state, you can recognize the fact that we all are quite mortal.
A little piece fell off. The little piece that connected the good deeds, the morals, the ideals and the relative path to being a "good person" to something greater, got unstuck. The glue no longer works anymore, and it seems I need to change it.
Heroes fell. Villains fell. I desperately tried to grab them by their capes, and pin them to the concepts they once held. The concept that they were more than mere mortals. More than mere humans driven by very human drives. But it was no use.
The magic that once held the human condition went away, and suddenly the human being was not an instrument of God (whomever you might choose) anymore. No more a reflection of a divine creation. No more a "human", as I once acknowledged.
Now, it was nothing more but a living organism that was separated from the dogs and frogs by nothing but an illusory conceptual line that just keeps repeating to itself: "Relative Intelligence".
But beyond that, there was the light: the fact that we are mere mortals and can change ourselves to the very extreme. The fact that we are ruled by laws we can grasp and apply can be quite the realization: we no longer depend on fate. Or god. Or any of these forces beyond our comprehension. We only depend on ourselves and how we can tackle the world around us. Our humanity could actually be the path to our very own salvation.
So, perhaps while a part of me still believes in fairies, ghosts, UFOs and other interesting phenomena as a pastime, another is bound to the reality and began driving my every decision:
"We are well behaved animals, and we all are going to die"
Perhaps I'll find a glue. This time, a better one.