You should understand by now, with all due respect to every religious belief, that the meaning of life and death has escaped exactly 100% of all human beings since the dawn of civilization. That rather infinite statistic should persuade you to escape your foolishness in pondering the unknowable or in imagining the unimaginable. As a typical human of standard intellect, you of course ignore this wisdom as did both your scholarly and dull-witted predecessors. After all, this obsessively inquisitive behavior is  integral to the human genetic code — no less instinctive than the migration of the humpback whale. In fact, this very analytic exercise is like plowing over already tilled soil. But you do it anyway, as if expecting your Maker to allow you and you alone — access to the inaccessible — essentially to occupy a god-like status. How silly. Utterly. Fret not and forgive yourself this rote behavior, because cognition is a uniquely human gift, or curse, depending on your circumstance. Monks, nuns and other clerics make a career out of this sort of resolute mulling. Some, as you would expect, investigate and pore over ancient scrolls thought to be divinely inspired and divinely written by human hand. In pulpits throughout the land, professional theologians go so far as to interpret the divine writings of saintly authors, and even feel compelled to pronounce, with official certainty, what God actually thinks, asks, sees, and  needs — what in fact He wants you to do and think — today. These churchly affirmations seem a bit presumptuous but no doubt are sincere, born out of scriptural study and no small amount of historical evidence — testimony that the devout accept as gospel. This attention to spiritual thought is paramount because your Life Force can’t accommodate the thought of Nothingness, can it? Yet, if Death offers a “peace that passeth all understanding,” why is Life itself precious beyond all else and protected at all cost? And so you come full circle, like a hamster doggedly exercising his wire wheel. Your only excuse for this barren meditation, beyond some mental dysfunction, is an abnormal obsession with injustice. You can rationalize the natural selection of natural disaster and the dark destiny of self-directed human folly. But you have zero capacity for sociopaths who inflict suffering and death; or for afflictions that steal childhood; or political evil and treachery that oppress and persecute millions. No, with all due respect to heavenly redemption, you will never rationalize earthly injustice — the countless examples of unspeakable atrocity — the common examples of unrelenting theft. Since there’s no way out of this incessant brooding, you clearly must wait your turn in line to learn the final answers; and when you do, you may find yourself singing the last verse of a favorite Peggy Lee tune:

I know what you must be saying to yourselves
If that’s the way (he) feels about it
Then why doesn’t (he) just end it all;
Oh no. not me. I’m not ready for the final disappointment,
‘Cause I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you
That when that final moment comes
And I’m breathing my last breath
I know what I’ll be saying to myself
” Is that all there is ? “

Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is.