Death

People die. It’s the sad truth. Every day hundreds, thousands, of people take their last breaths in this world. As a Catholic, I believe in an afterlife of Heaven or Hell. But as a curious human interested in other cultures and religions, I still question if that is the true fate of our souls. I think it would be amazing for reincarnation to exist. For you to leave one life and enter another, completely different life. In a way, that theory even makes sense. After all, how many times have you had a deja vu moment? And I forget what, but I think in some religion it is believed that the cries of being born are the screams of your death in your previous life. I think that’s pretty cool. Thinking about what happens to you after death is intriguing to me, but dealing with the thought of death now is still sad. Still scary.

I feel great empathy when someone dies. I feel the sadness that their family and friends feel. Not to the extreme, of course, but this past year of 2013 had a lot of deaths in it. Of people I knew; of people close to people I knew; and even people I didn’t really know. At my high school we used to stand guard outside, praying over the family and friends of the deceased as they drove to the burial site of their loved one. Being in college, things were different when someone died. I couldn’t just go stand guard outside anymore. At times I couldn’t even be near anyone who knew the deceased. Over break, though, a friend’s dad died. It was a death no one saw coming and I didn’t understand it. I still don’t really. I still think sometimes that the next softball game I go to of my friend’s he’ll still be there coaching on the sidelines. But he won’t be. He was the nicest man and their entire family are some of the nicest people I have ever met in my life. When I heard about the death one of the main things in my mind was: “why do bad things happen to good people?” I don’t know the answer and I don’t think I ever will. People say it’s so they can learn from it, but what lesson could be so important  that a death has to occur? I don’t know.

I don’t really like thinking about death or about the people I know who have died because it makes me sad. I try to just think of the happy memories with them or memories that I had heard about them when they were happy but the nagging thought always comes back that I won’t ever see them again. Not in this world, at least.

Every day different people have to deal with the death of somebody. Because, well, people die. And it hurts to see them go and I don’t think that hurt will ever fully go away, but you pretend that it does. You pretend that you’re okay, even if you’re not, because what else would you do? So, the epiphany at hand is simply this: people die, and it hurts. But eventually the hurt will subside because you will realize that something has to happen to us after we die. Something. Anything. Because, as the book “Looking for Alaska” by John Green states, “We cannot be born and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations.”

To all those who have lost somebody: they may be gone from this world, but they’re not gone forever. So smile and enjoy life for them since they can no longer do it themselves. Wherever they are, I assure you they must be happy so you should be happy, too. It’s what they would want.