Last year I wrote this, not knowing how close I would come today to answering it.
Death. I have never experienced death closely. All the people I love are thankfully alive. But sometimes I think how would it feel to know someone I loved died. I am so scared of losing.
Sometimes I think if I see death too closely, I won’t ever be able to love again. I want forever. But in truth, there is no forever at any given time. No one can guarantee that they’ll be with me forever. I am scared once I get used to their presence, I wouldn’t survive their absence.
To those who die, death is the end. And the start of some sorts. But to others its the middle of something. You don’t want to go on, but it’s your not your end. You can’t start over because nothing has ended for you. You are stuck at this impasse you can’t get out of.
Death’s not about questions or answers. It’s just ultimate and irreversible. So how do people deal will death? How do they find the strength, the hope to go on? I don’t know, I guess I don’t even want to find out. Because once I do, I’ll know for sure how much I have in me to love again.
Today as I sit down to write this, I cannot write with the innocence or the eloquence of the girl who doesn’t know death. Death seems so hauntingly familiar now, no longer a concept I cannot grasp. I do not ask those same questions anymore, because sometimes answering them doesn’t make it any better. I still have been thinking though, how death has changed not just my perspective, but my whole existence.
When someone you know died, the death you are mourning becomes inside of you, as if a part of you had died as well. You can’t rationally explain that death to yourself. You cannot distance yourself from it. It feels like you are carrying a little death inside your body, in your memory and nothing will ever make that part of you live again.
You start to mourn not only for the person who is gone, but for every little thing that is now gone from your life as well. It’s hard to explain to others that you can’t just moved on. Logic like you are alive makes no sense to you. You see death no longer as something incomprehensible, but as something substantial.
Death changes the lives of the people who live in ways the dead do not understand. Death becomes a name, a face, a voice you long to hear. It becomes touch, and memory and all the things you wished you had prayed for. Death is not lying in the grave, it is staring at you everyday in everything you do. There is no getting rid of that feeling, no hiding. It takes away your ability to see the world without fear again. It makes you think you will never trust again.
People tell me, eventually this fades. They say I will smile again, laugh again, enjoy my life again. I do, but one moment, one memory is all it takes to invite that cold, seeping emptiness back into my life. Sometimes, quiet foolishly, I wish I had never written that piece last year, questioning, mocking death. For now death will follow me in every step of my life.
Amar Shobdo 