“Don’t fear death.  We are constantly dying.  Dying every day.  Life is a one way street.  Time marches in one direction.  Things are always ending, always coming to a close, or getting closer to one.  We have to accept change, embrace it. None of us maintain anything or any form forever.  We are transitioning always.  Everything is tinged with a kind of dying.  Everything is a phase,” Marcus Aurelius/author unknown.  Cat’s out of the bag: I hate death.  I would avoid death at all costs for nearly anything.  I told stories of how, as a child, I wanted to be a vampire so I could live forever.  I hated the idea of losing someone or something dear to me because I lost people very close to me at a young age.  Perhaps more psychologically draining were the people I nearly lost.  It felt like I was constantly on the lookout for someone to get hurt or die or go away.  I never wanted them to.  People moving away?  I couldn’t stand it.  I think I was forced into change too quickly and too young too often where I became averse to change.  There are many facets of change that I love and embrace in their entirety.  You need to switch that wardrobe?  Go for it.  You want a new job?  If that works for you, do it.  You want to add in a healthier recipe for the week?  Awesome.  But this last hurdle, this last frontier of change is one that I can’t seem to reconcile with.  I have borne witness to a significant amount of loss and know it happens to us all.  I have been part of something that simply didn’t work and it was time to end it so I know that things don’t last forever.  My question has always been why?  We can argue evolution and improvement but that doesn’t ease the ache from losing what was. 

The thing with death is that it speaks of the ultimate finality which is scary in itself.  It even speaks of the unknown which there’s no way to prepare for.  It speaks to the fact that we have no control which kind of sucks.  But the part that no one really talks about, the part that bothers me the most is the emptiness.  That moment when you walk back into the house and you know that person will never be there again. The moment you realize you’ll never hear their laugh again, feel their hug, eat that special dish only they could make. I struggle to understand how there’s this before where this person or this thing is in your life and then it’s just gone.  How something is here one second and then not in the next breath.  Just typing that out leaves a hollow pit in my stomach, my heart dropping down.  I’m not naïve enough to think we can evade death and there is some comfort in the idea that perhaps it really is just a transition to another form and there is something beyond what we can see.  I looked at death as the ultimate enemy for taking the people and things I loved—I never looked at it as necessary.  Sure, even I can admit there is beauty in the cycle: we spring forth, we live and enjoy life full of vitality and luster, we may begin to slow down, still seeing the beauty of our lives and still living as much as we can, and then we embrace the cold and put our shells to rest, nourishing for the next one.  The idea that energy is never destroyed is pretty cool.  And we won’t get this answer today—perhaps never—as to why we need to transmute and change.  I mean, if we are given such a short time here, you’d think there would be manuals or cheat codes or something to tell us how to get it right on our path the first time around.    

I understand evolution and the need for change but I don’t see the point in putting us on such a short quest to find the meaning of it all.  I feel like time is a sort of sick game—we only get one shot to get it right and we never know if we are right until it’s over.  We watch ourselves decay in a hideous dichotomy of living while dying.  I mean, at what point to those cells that sustain us go from giving us life to no longer being able to function?  And even worse than that is we sometimes see the young ones go.  I don’t see the purpose in illness and discord and fighting and ego—yet we all experience that those things.  Humans are complicated.  We try to avoid death (a lot of us do) and it’s like running a race we can never win.  It will ALWAYS catch us. It makes sense to befriend the fate we all share.  It makes sense to try and understand what comes next.  But that part of the journey we will all take alone, we don’t share the answer.  In some logical part of my brain, I know death isn’t evil, it probably isn’t even bad.  It just IS.  Yet the part of me grasping to keep things as they were, to have the same level of conversation with my father I did 10 years ago, to have my loved ones still alive, to have not lost so many key support systems in my life very much thinks death is an evil bastard.  We can do nothing about it, so perhaps the lesson is that we must embrace the phase we are in.  Embrace the now.  It’s said that we will never be this old or this young again, all we have is now.  All we can do is our best and somehow, some way make peace with what our lives are and the cycle that has and will perpetuate for millennia.  Make peace with the unknown that comes for us all and appreciate the grand adventure we are on while we are on it.  Don’t take anything for granted.  The greatest greeting for death is a life well lived.  So live.