Life After Death

What About Death?

Death is so final.  It changes us, wakes us up to its nightmare with no alternative end, nothing pretty, happy, better.

No wonder we run from it, put forth all our energy to deny it.  It breaks us, our hearts, our souls, makes us grow up terribly and wipes the smile from our eyes.

What About Untimely Death?

My daughter died at 37, my husband at 43.  There is no making these tragedies right.

Neither one of them should have died.  If they had received the medical care they sought and deserved, they may well have lived – but that didn’t happen.

What About Grief?

They each left small children and another parent to bring them up in shattered, shell-shocked, externally smiling and seemingly normal families.  We all missed the boat in stopping these disgusting tragedies, and so it became a death boat that took them both and sailed away, never to return.

Am I angry?  Despairing?  Disgusted?  Broken?  Sunk?  You bet I am.

Can We Stop Running From Death?

Everyone keeps telling me how good I look, how young.  Who knew life could be so cruel and wicked, laughing and denying how marked I am, how marked we all are?

We aren’t taught these things happen.  We are instead taught in so many verbal and nonverbal ways to run from death, strut around like puffed up children pretending it doesn’t exist in its horror and it won’t happen, and then we have to tell children their parents won’t ever be back, not ever, not to graduations, marriages, births of grandchildren and all the rest.

Questions With No Answers – Ever

I look at married couples my age with grandchildren, intact families, laughing, taking such great smug pleasure in their wholeness and I’m sick inside.  Why did my husband and daughter die at 37 and 43? 

Why did I bring 4 children up largely alone and never find lasting, growing, sharing love again?  Why did I have to look my 3 grandchildren in the face and tell them, “Surprise” – their mother died and at the time no one knew why?

The Only Way to Evolve and Heal

This is the truth I face.  It’s all I have because its real. 

Who the hell knows about a hereafter?  The only gift of death is to teach us how to grow up and love, and really admit that no one, as the saying goes, gets out of here alive.

What We Can Finally Embrace, Act and Transform From

So what are we going to do with that?  Can we dare to live our lives accordingly without a childlike embellishment of fanciful “what if’s”?

Maybe we would actually stop killing each other.  Maybe we would stop denying each other’s equal humanness and remove forever the infinitely violating versions of calling humans “others”.

Maybe we would think in moments – could it be every moment – that we all struggle and feel pain and are afraid; and stop hurting, ignoring each other?  Maybe we would look at each other and ourselves and say, “this person – and me – will definitely die some day, some moment, and none of us knows when that moment is…and through that, there will be a rectification and fallout, and there will be no more chances to make anything right or change anything – all we have is now…this shared moment…and how do we choose to be?”   

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