FOR A VERY long time, death was a highly elusive and frightening thing to me. When people I knew died, I was hugely puzzled by how it worked, and scared because I didn’t know exactly what to feel. Are we to be saddened because they’re gone, or just be okay because they’d moved on to another existence?
That all changed when my father died in 2012. I didn’t see him as much as I used to, and though he got a bit weaker as he grew older, it never occurred to me he would one day be gone. Then one day, he was.
That unknowable feeling about death was something I suddenly knew very well, something deeply personal and tangible.
Part of it was the suddenness. Another part of it was the finality. All of a sudden, he was gone, and gone for good.
I missed his sense of humor, his bright intellect and his gentleness. I couldn’t help but think about not being with him more, not having done more things with him. I’ve been told these are natural things to feel about a close loved one who died, but when it happened to me, it really felt like it was happening only to me.
Since then, I’ve felt unnerved every time someone I knew died. It’s like a gear had been shifted, and what I once felt detached from was something I was really connected to, and it scared me even more. I sometimes look at people around me, and I fear eventually losing them as well.
That’s when you figure out what matters most to you, when you realize the value of people.
This is the struggle I feel with coming to terms with death. It’s all about living without thinking of it on a day-to-day basis, because the worst thing it can do is get in the way of living a life without constant regret.