The Shake-Up

Earnest Hemingway once said, "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” Unfortunately for Hemingway however, he did have to leave it and at one time or another, we all will. As the saying goes, the only two things you can be sure of in life are death and taxes. 


Even though death is certain, it certainly doesn't seem to make it any easier to deal with. We're surrounded by it non-stop in our day to day lives and on T.V. Every one has lost a loved one, a cherished friend, a pet that was closer to us than perhaps even our own siblings are, but all of these losses never seem to make it any easier to bear when it's time for the next one to go. 


And death is a funny thing, because even in death, people are never remembered as they truly were, but rather it seems as some sort of ethereal being. I'm not sure if this out of respect for the dead- as in you can't talk badly about those who have passed, or whether it's some sort of subconscious thing. I tried googling it to see if there was something written about it, but there wasn't. And I'm sure I could log on to my school's website and research it in the psychology journals, but really, who wants to do that? But the fact none the less remains, that we just don't talk bad about the dead or even the reality of what the person was like. I'm sure we had no problem bad mouthing them when they were alive though. I told you, it's a funny thing, death is. 


When it does come to death however, I find that I tend to deal better with it than most. There's a couple reason for this I think. One being that I truly do believe in God and the bible and all that it says about death. I believe our lives here are like kindergarten- we're just getting started, learning the basics. And therefore in death here, we are then reborn into a new life there. The second is that death is sad, it is painful, but it happens. There's no getting out of it, you can only attempt to delay it as long as possible, but inevitably, when it's your time to go, you will go. Another reason is logic I think. You can only be upset for so long and then you need to get over it. 


My family was recently caught off guard by the death of one of my mom's sisters. She was having a "routine" surgery and passed away due to complications. It seems that everyone was shaken up, except for me. Oooh, it figures. It's just that, in life, she really wasn't that nice of a person (there I go, breaking the rules!) and we weren't close.. at all. In fact she wasn't close with anyone, not even her children (this is me stating facts, not bad mouthing). However, I do hope that she made it to heaven, regardless, but I'm just not terribly upset about it. 


I think part of the shake up was due to her age. She died young, we just don't expect people to die at 50 now when the age expectancy is well into the 80s. But I have a long way to go to 50, especially since I'm never going to be older than 27. Also, we consider surgeries so routine now that for people to die during them is startling- thank you ER and Gray's Anatomy. Another reason I blame for the shake up is that the death of other's forces us to confront our own fears about ourselves dying. It causes us to think about what happens after this, what are we living for, what will we leave behind us, among other things. I think this is why it was especially hard on Gramps. 


However, I also find that in death there is comfort. No matter who you are, I know life is a struggle for you. We all have hard ships that we fight constantly to overcome and there is a peace that comes with death knowing that that person no longer has to face that. No longer will they be hurt, or hungry, or weary, no, they have moved on to a place which we can only dream of and will have to wait until it's our turn to experience. 


But, then that of course makes us begin to fear death again... it's rather cyclic isn't?