Nothing like attending a wake to give one a moments pause, and nothing like having three within 9 months to make one sit down and really stop…
…I have no problems with death really. The truth that it’s just a journey to a better place is something that has been a comfort to me my whole life. Even thought of taking the trip myself a couple of times in the past. Typical teenage angst stuff, glad that I have outgrown it.
But even though I’m no stranger to thinking about death and its issues, sometimes – like most things – it’s easy to forget stuff about it. Stuff like how, it’s not a personal thing, that there are others who have known and been touched by the person in question and that they deserve to have whatever burdens of grief and lost that they carry be helped by others who may not be carrying as much, to help share and lighten the load as it may be.
Another thing that’s easy to forget is that there are fates worse than death. A ‘life’ that’s is so removed from the peak’s as well as the down’s that make up the landscape of human Life, like a mirrored image, or ghost state, or even zombie like, if you will.
Imagine a ‘life’, body still hale and stout, yet shut away, not against it’s will mind you, unattended and ignored, halfway to being wasted away. A mind already there, struggling to maintain and make use of dormant synapses, trying to adsorb and make use of data to it’s full potential, but choked by distractions and reduced to ignored ramblings.
Image a soul, broken and cold. Desperate to find warmth, it loses itself, in the dreamscapes of fiction; in the oceans and hills of make believe worlds, among imagined people living imagined lives. It senses the real world moving on without it and longs for it, but yet chooses not to participate. Opportunities come and go and still it sits, ever watching, letting time tick on by, it’s link to the Real only through the lives of those called friends.
Yes, there are fates worse than death.
Sometimes I wonder if I did take that journey after all.
