What Skeletons Taught Me About Living

Death is not the enemy of life but its measure.

I learned to fear death long before I ever understood life. Growing up, we sang hymns rejoicing life triumphing over death, we spoke about the power of resurrection and we gloried in verses like, “Odeath, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” But underneath the words was always an undercurrent of dread. Death was not spoken of as a natural part of life but as the doorway to judgment, and every breath carried the weight of my eternal reward. The result was that death became something to both deny and fear.

Because if meaning only exists in some future life, then what happens if you never reach that reward? What if this life is just wasted breath, a meaningless prelude?

Instead of comforting me, that belief kept me paralyzed—haunted by the thought of death, and by the fear that I could never measure up, never live fully by Christ, never turn quickly enough to my spirit, never forsake what was natural in me, and never keep myself free from sin. Which meant my eternal reward was always at risk.

Leaving that system loosened the fear at its root. And ironically, death did not grow darker once I let go of those beliefs—it became strangely comforting. To belong again to nature’s process, to return to the soil, to take my place in a cycle older and wiser than humanity itself—there is peace in that.

My fear now is no longer of death, but of a life unlived.

I fear days rushed through without presence, of love left unspoken, of beauty overlooked, of never daring to inhabit the short, fragile span that is mine.

That shift has opened my eyes to the beauty of how other cultures honor the dead. Rituals, songs, festivals, and altars—these aren’t demonic, as I was once taught, but acts of remembrance. Ways of saying: your life still matters, your story still speaks. When I watched my own mother lose my father, I saw how her grief was stifled by doctrine. She was told to rejoice instead of mourn, to bypass her heartbreak with empty smiles about his “reward.” What a theft. It robbed her, and me, of the right to grieve.

Now I see the exact opposite. Grieving is honoring, and remembering our dead is one of the most human things we can do.

If you had told my former self—the girl who thought Halloween decor was an open door to evil—that one day she’d have not one but four skeletons lounging on her porch, she would have gasped and prayed for your soul. Yet here we are. The bones stay out all October, and I smile every time I see them. They are no longer grotesque, not a symbol of terror. Ironically, our little skeleton family is a reminder of freedom—the freedom of no longer being terrorized by death itself. They grin at me every time I come home, a rictus of eternity, and in their hollow grin I hear them say, “You are here, you are alive, and that is enough.”

I believe, to the marrow of my being, that to live fully today requires making peace with becoming bone tomorrow.

I was reminded of this once while driving with my daughter. A deer had died at the side of the road, and vultures were gathered, doing what vultures do. She was disgusted. I was grateful. The cycle was working: nothing wasted, everything returning. Vultures, those much-maligned birds, are the earth’s garbage disposals. Without them, we would be overwhelmed with rot. They are part of the balance.

Death is part of the balance.

So much of the American culture recoils from death, I fear that may be part of why our care for the elderly is so tragic. When we treat death as something to exile and ignore, instead of a natural part of living, we risk pushing away those who remind us of death as well. And in pushing them away, we also push away the wisdom and beauty they offer.

This Halloween, when I see skeletons on porches, I’m reminded that living without fear of what comes after is its own freedom.

My childhood faith tried to bury this truth: Death is not the enemy of life but its measure, the shadow that makes each moment burn brighter. The real haunting was never death, but the risk of a life unlived.