What is the value?

What is the value of life, or even a single life? Does it matter if it is human? Does it matter if it is intelligent? What is the value? Who can say? Who cares? Other than the insurance companies who put an actual monetary value on a life, I don't know who can say or who cares. I don't know if an insect is worth less than a sperm whale. I don't know why it is considered a tragedy when a thousand people die in an earthquake or avalanche and why no one mourns the millions of fish caught in the sea every day.

What I am beginning to grasp, ever so slowly, is the value of death. I'm not referring to the "random" acts of destruction humans perform on other humans or the devastation Nature wreaks upon the human condition. I understand those, too, or at least I think I do. I'm referring to the life span. I'm referring to the reason that some people prefer to die than to live. When one has a conscience and one executes acts in his or her life which, at the time seemed like a good idea, but later turn out to have caused others significant distress, it tends to make one seek a way to make up for those acts. Eventually, most people realize that there is no way to make up for what they have done. The damage is done and cannot be undone or repaired no matter what one does. At that point one has a choice of paths:

• They may live with what they have done and attempt to forget about it.
• They may live with what they have done and grow a scab over their conscience so that it no longer bothers them.
• They may live with what they have done but allow it to consume them, every new action considered and reconsidered in a vain attempt to prevent such damage from ever happening again.
• They may die, which, in theory removes the pain of the guilt and self-hatred.
  

There are probably other options but it seems likely that other options simply lead to these options in one fashion or another.

So, although I do not seek death, nor do I long for it, I now see more clearly its value than every I have before.