All humans are born with the predisposition for decomposition. Without death, there would be no life. Humans feed on dead animals. Those animals feed on plants. Those plants nourish themselves with the rotted remains of the plants and animals before them. A delicate cycle. And like most delicate cycles, humans found a way to mess it up.

Halloween wasn’t born by random chance, but out of necessity. Inherently, most cultures understand the practice of honoring the dead, of celebrating, of breathing life back into the memory of them. Of course, remembering the dead brings its own discomforts. To acknowledge their existence, we must acknowledge our own mortality.

There are those that would shy away from this acknowledgement. Those that would rather conceal the importance of death, and gloss over it with the glitter and cheer of Christmas and other cozy winter holidays. A sick imbalance pervades when such non-sense is allowed to fester.

Step into the grocery store in mid-October, and already you will see the twinkling lights of Christmas trees. The coffee mugs with bold letters spouting about the most wonderful time of the year. Innocent in its frivolity, but if you knew the real truth of it, you might well curl into the fetal position as you rocked desperately in the corner.

You see, when we forget to honor the dead, when we instead gloss over those uncomfortable emotions with a smattering of glitter and candy-canes, something terrible happens. Death gets angry. You must understand, she takes great care of the many souls that have been ferried her way. They are her children, her wards. If they are not permitted their chance to visit with us, to be acknowledged by us, to remind us all of the great care that she will take of us, then Death decides that she must remind us herself.

So she takes more than her share. In her great anger, Death shakes the earth, floods the lands, rips up homes, tears apart families on a scale we’ve not yet seen before. Millions cry out to be spared, but she is not so forgiving. The lucky ones are those who die. Those that do not have to suffer the agony of their whole world destroyed around them; everything they’ve ever known washed away in an instant. She wants us to understand that the only place we have left to go is into her waiting arms, that it’s safe there. There is no escaping her, no matter how hard we might wish it, no matter how much we might gloss over the uncomfortable truth with the promise of catchy tunes by the cozy fire, a glass of egg-nog in our hands.

Don’t be so afraid of what comes next, for what you may suffer now is far worse than any afterlife you can imagine.

And remember, on Halloween, the dead must be allowed to walk.