It's funny the way most people love the dead. Once you are dead

The immortal Jimi Hendrix, master of sound and soul, once spoke these haunting words: “It’s funny the way most people love the dead. Once you are dead, you are made for life.” At first, this saying may sound like a jest, a cynical remark on fame — yet within it lies the eternal lament of artists, prophets, and dreamers through the ages. It is a truth as old as civilization itself: that humanity too often honors greatness only when it can no longer be touched by it. The living are questioned, doubted, envied — but the dead are sanctified. The flame that burned too bright is loved only after it has gone out.

In these few words, Hendrix reveals the irony of existence: that death perfects what life refuses to see. The world is quick to dismiss the living genius — to call him strange, reckless, or mad — but when the same soul departs, his flaws are forgotten, his spirit is polished by memory, and his work becomes holy. The ancients knew this well. The poet Homer, who may have wandered unknown in his time, became the voice of Greece only after his passing. Van Gogh, tormented and alone, sold but one painting while alive — yet after his death, his colors set the heavens ablaze. And Hendrix himself, like a shooting star, burned across the sky of the 1960s, misunderstood by many, adored by all only after silence claimed his guitar.

The ancients would have said this is the way of mortal hearts: they see clearly only when the light is gone. When the living walk among us, they remind us of our own limitations; their greatness unsettles us, challenges our comfort. But when they die, they no longer threaten — they become symbols, pure and untouchable. Death, paradoxically, makes them eternal. Thus, the artist’s tragedy is also his triumph: his death transforms his life into myth, his voice into echo, his image into legend.

Think of Socrates, condemned by his city for “corrupting the youth.” While alive, he was mocked, scorned, and feared. But once he drank the hemlock, his name became immortal. His teachings, once whispered in alleys, became scripture for centuries. It is as if the world must kill its prophets before it can learn from them. The same fate befell Joan of Arc, Galileo, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless others whose fire burned too fiercely for their time. Hendrix’s words are the cry of all these spirits — a mixture of laughter and sorrow at the strange justice of the human heart.

Yet there is wisdom here, not bitterness. For Hendrix, in his brilliance, saw the humor in it — “it’s funny the way most people love the dead.” To laugh at such a truth is to rise above it. It is to recognize that this world moves in cycles of blindness and awakening. It is not that people are cruel, but that they are bound by fear — fear of loving too deeply what they do not yet understand. The laughter, then, is divine: the laughter of one who knows that his art, once planted in the soil of time, will bloom long after he has returned to dust.

And so, what lesson shall we draw from this? It is this: honor the living while they breathe. Speak your admiration not over tombs but into the ears of those who can still hear. Praise the artist before his hands grow still, thank the friend before her smile fades. Do not wait for the silence of death to recognize the music of life. To love the living is to defy the forgetting spirit of the age; it is to see the divine spark before it becomes an idol of memory.

Let us, then, live differently. Let us celebrate life before death, art before fame, passion before loss. Let us not wait for graves to remember gratitude. For if we can learn to love without delay — if we can honor greatness in its imperfect, living form — then we break the curse that Hendrix spoke of. We make life sacred while it still beats, and in doing so, we too are “made for life,” not by death, but by the grace of awareness.

So remember, O listener, the laughter of Hendrix was not despair — it was prophecy. It was the sound of one who saw beyond the veil. Love now. Admire now. Forgive now. For when you do, you will no longer need the grave to make a soul eternal — your love itself will make them live forever.