Why do deaths come in threes?

The three deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson have left the world in shock and grief. What surprises people most is that these major losses happened in such a short period of time. Even when grieving, people were wondering about a cultural phenomenon that seems to occur without fail: “Why do deaths come in threes?”

 

The answer may be quite unexpected and the idea has been around for many millennia, even from the beginning of time: It is a modern version of what we know as “prophecy.”

 

When people think of “Prophecy,” stories from the Bible and Nostradamus immediately come to mind. So people do not think of prophecy as anything currently relevant. In the Bible, one example of prophecy was Joseph's prediction that Egypt would have seven years of abundance immediately followed by seven years of famine. In one of Nostradamus' quatrains, he predicted the Cold War between the United States and Russia and its end through interpretation, centuries after his predictions.

 

Prophecy exists although never quite recognized in today's world. The point of prophecy is that a statement reverberates so strongly within a culture, that the society seeks to fulfill it through its perceptions and it becomes an unwitting expectation.

 

Our culture is so attuned to the idea of “Death comes in threes” that as an entire society, we seek this out. We believe in the mysticism and the power of that prophecy. If Michael Jackson had not been the third person, we would have sought out whoever that third person was and the Universe would have granted it to us. If the prophecy had been “Deaths come in fives,” the Universe would grant us two more deaths to fulfill that prophecy.

 

People attribute a certain power to the number “three”: Everything from Catholicism where they believe in God as a Trinity of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit to the three Greek Fates, Clotho, Atropos and Lachesis to the basic biological family of father, mother and child. Because the pattern is so prevalent within society in our observations, society seeks to match other events in that pattern. Deaths are not the only things to come in threes; so do marriages, births, job losses, employment, accidents and anything we are seeking to match this pattern.

 

Within our own personal lives, we can be so attuned to death that it becomes more noticeable in our own lives: An uncle may die during the same time, a friend's mother, a teacher, a less-famous author of a book and suddenly, we can count eight people that we know have died during the week. Even though death is a natural process and happens to many people, our inclination to find the pattern becomes an expectation. The Universe will fulfill whatever we are thinking, personally and socially.

 

Another more modern and popular version of a prophecy would be Andy Warhol's quote of “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” Everyone in our culture believes this so strongly that it permeates throughout our civilization and social interaction. We now have reality television, shorts on YouTube and blogs on the internet that fulfill this prophecy.

 

In a way, prophecy may seem like a blasphemous word to use because we traditionally reserve it for matters of greater importance. However, prophecy has an element that makes “Deaths occur in threes” much more deserving of the name prophecy rather than calling it a superstition: It's our way of understanding mystical things and the unknown that is outside our control. To many of us, death is a definite but uncertain process. It may be expected in our loved ones advanced in age and to those battling cancer, but it can be as quick as a cardiac arrest in those we expect to live tomorrow. If we as a society know that a third death is coming, the grief may not be lessened, but we can accept an uncertain fate like death in our lives. As a society, we would no longer have to seek an answer that we cannot have. We have an answer because we built our answer. Then as a society, we can move on and function in the world to do as we need.

 

Finally, pun intended, there is another version of prophecy, a strong apocalyptic belief that the world will end in 2012. This year has been cited in the Aztec sun calendar, the Chinese I Ching and according to a recent Discovery Channel, scientific basis dealing with a shift of the Earth's magnetic poles. Whether the world will actually end will be strongly determined if our society expects it will cease to exist.