Peace

It’s a natural part of getting older that we start to think about the end. Especially when a marital partner and kids enter the equation. In all honesty, it becomes a heavier and heavier burden as we age because we begin to see the people we love leaving us, whether we’re ready for them to go or not. 

I suppose I was lucky as a kid because, while my dad’s parents were long gone, I had both grandparents until I was ten when I lost my grandpa. I was never that close to many of my relatives so while I was sad to lose them, most didn’t impact me that deeply. 

Part of that is the immaturity of age. 

I didn’t quite understand life so I didn’t grasp death. 

Depending on your faith and upbringing you may believe that everyone goes to a happy place and it’s for the best. 

I don’t know that I thought that deeply about it. 

I do now. 

Death weighs on my heavily and I am starting to fear what it means. 

It’s not just the absence of someone we love but it’s not knowing what is next and the reality that life goes on without them. 

It shouldn’t. 

Things shouldn’t just carry on, but they do, and they have to. 

Otherwise, we’ll never move on. 

We’ll be like the dog in those stories where they stay by the grave of their owners indefinitely. 

At the dawn of 50 I have lost a lot of people who meant the world to me. I try not to think of them because to do so makes me realize what’s absent. 

These tiny pieces that are just gone from my heart. 

This doesn’t make me unique, or special, just human. 

Having lost another friend recently and an aunt not long before that I am considering death again. Something I wanted desperately for myself but which I appreciate more now and fear. I don’t believe in an afterlife. The afterlife, for me, is peace. Is an end to the worries and pain that makes us human. It comes at the cost of one’s Self and of the ones we love. 

It’s a price I don’t know that most of us care to pay but which we will. 

Afterlife means that we live on, in memories, in deeds, in our art, in our works, and in half-remembered thoughts. We are blurry, out of focus, but the feeling of us is there. 

I fear death, but just as much, I fear what people will remember of me, or think of me. 

I fear that I will burden someone with my ‘stuff’ and with the baggage we all carry with us through life. 

There really is only forward. 

Only ahead. 

Otherwise, we fall into the mire of remorse and regret and loss and we squander this strange, rare gift we have. 

A gift we never asked for, and sometimes resent. 

A gift we are told to appreciate because some don’t get what we have. 

And we spend so much time on hate and anger, so much of this life we have to carve out from the stone of survival and work, and for what?

It’s an investment in a hole in the ground. 

It’s an investment in a toilet to nowhere. 

We are all destined to leave without accomplishing all we wanted, loving all that we could, and living as much as we were able. 

We will always have unfinished business. 

All we can do is be more mindful about the cost of the negativity we put into the world intentionally aimed at others and ask ourselves Why and what it gains us. 

And hopefully, as the curtains draw closed, we can find some manner of peace in the person we were, the life we lived, and the lives we touched. 

…c…