The lure of Death

Death according to the Hausas of Northern Nigeria, rigan kowar simply put, death is the shirt or dress everyone will wear, no one really loves death even believers, who profess a better hereafter life dont want to die. The bible records the story of the Israeli King Hezekiah who was told by a prophet to put his house in order because he was going to die. The brave King, we are told turned hide face to the wall and wept. God heard the anguish of his heart and his life was prolonged by fifteen more years.
Fear or lure for death is irrelevant. Death usually comes unexpectedly. Of course, this is not true for those who commit suicide or persons who are executed. In the new age people have been clamouring for death and are campaigning to allow the state to allow them get help to facilitate death for themselves. For this category of people, death is preferable to the pains they are subjected to. Death for them is a relief.
Not so for majority of people. For the vast majority of people, death ought to be postponed, avoided and if possible even killed. If only we would not die or age how sweet, they think life could be. For some other people death is a finality, implies failure to achieve set objectives or a journey into the unknown. What with the fact that most religions, death is a passage to the judgement seat of God who is going to judge people for all they have said or done while on earth. For these people death only appears as a bailiff who ushers people into the court room of God.
For all these reasons, most people fear death. So morbid has been the fear of death that people do all sorts of things, including, you may say, selfishly killing other people that they may live.
It is a well known fact that people fear to go near corpses. Some traditions forbid traditions rulers from looking at corpses. At most funeral services the corpses remind us of our mortality.

Culture, they say, is dynamic even though people still fear death and dread the thought of dying, it is no longer strange for people to throng to homes of bereaved relations and stay there for days on end, eating and drinking free. A few years ago, it was the practice only in the Southern states of Nigeria that death became reasons to roll out the drums, eat and dance to overfill.
The economic crisis in Nigeria has introduced new forms of cultural norms. About two years ago, my uncles wife was shot dead by bandits near Wukari. Medical personnel who travelled with the wife to Taraba State Governor, she had taken bullets that may have been meant for someone else. Expectedly, my uncle himself a retired civil servant was distraught. I was shocked when we had to take turns to take pictures with the casket. Indeed so shocked was I that I refused to print the pictures taken.
I thought my uncle had lost it. Why would anyone pose for a photograph with a corpse in a closed casket? After a year, I had to print the pictures.
Now besides the strange posing of photographs with caskets, we now have been moving from one funeral house to another for sake of food. Unlike wedding ceremonies where besides eating food, people give gifts, for most people funerals are absolute losses.
Besides losing your relation, you may have to empty your pockets and barns to feed people who come. Of course, most people who come would simply eat and go.
Death now draws people together when it comes, money is forced out of the pockets of the bereaved to feed, sometimes, several tens of people for three to five days.