Death. It comes for us all. The inevitability of it glares each and every one of us in the face like a mugger in a dark alleyway of a terribly busy city with far too much street noise for anyone to be able to take note of what is happening.
And just like the confrontation in that dark alleyway, each person must face that mugger alone.
I, admittedly, haven't lost that many people in my life. I don't have that many people in my life to begin with. I'm not someone who would ever be considered extroverted or popular. I don't try to be, either, to be fair, but it does leave for a limited range of people to lose to begin with.
And of those I've lost, its been seldom been due to an outright, seemingly random illness. There have been the deaths of old age, of overdoses, or of various things related to those things. But already this year, I have lost a family member to COVID and pneumonia and another is on hospice due to cancer.
Every one of these situations carries with it their own lessons, I suppose, is an appropriate way of putting it. It is so easy to see how simple choices could have led me down a similar path, or how splintered relationships during life can lead to all sorts of re-evaluating what is important.
And of course, as I age, death is going to become ever more present. People can only live for so long before expiring, and its quite a rarity that I got to meet so many of my great grandparents while they were alive. We, of course, have science to thank for that.
There is something so different about these recent events, though. The difference being, of course, what they represent to me in my life and how the loss impacts me.
Everyone we meet throughout the journey of our lives has an impact on us. My cousin Jason was someone I thought was the coolest person I had ever met while I was young, and I wanted so badly to have him think I was cool, too. Losing him, admittedly, didn't come to me as the biggest shock, but it did lead me to a deeper understanding that I could have ended up in a similar situation. And I will miss him. Every time I think about being young and thinking about how it always looked like he was just so full of life and fun.
Losing my grandmother, that was the first real loss. That one was hard for a multitude of reasons. Watching my dad and how he reacted to it really gave me my first look at him as a human being. It also led me to wrestling with my own mortality, leading me to a massive shift of what was even important to me to begin with in life. There are things about my grandmother's death I've still yet to be able to fully process, or perhaps I'm simply not yet ready to say out loud.
My uncle is the most recent loss. Before he had passed away, while he was in the hospital and I had yet to find out how bad the situation truly was, I reflected with Roxanne about how he was the first person who really imprinted on me the desire for knowledge. Being around him when I was so young, he would always have little facts he'd share with me. These tidbits of information that, alone really weren't anything special, but the fact that he always had so many of them led me to being constantly intrigued with what else there was out there to learn. It is easy to trace that to me reading physics, philosophy, and religions starting around age 13 or 14, and using the internet to hack into college curriculums so I could attempt to teach myself what college students were learning before I even had my license.
Now my cousin is in hospice care, mere weeks after the loss of my uncle, dying of cancer. Opting to avoid the pain killers so she can be as present with her young children before her untimely passing. And like every other loss, this one, too, is completely unique. She is slightly younger than me - a year or so - and I always saw her as being so much more intelligent than me, and so much more wholesome, good, of a person than I could have ever been. And she always come off as so optimistic and happy. In some ways, the characteristics that I admired so much in her are the ones I wish I had more of - or any of. Seeing how life is playing out for her is so painful because no one deserves to go through what she is going through right now, and has been going through, but it being such a good person just feels so much worse.
I have been fortunate enough to have not lost many people in my life thus far. I know it could happen. The understanding that life can end in a split second and unexpectedly is what has propelled my decisions to move across the country what feels like a thousand times, or to jump into new career paths just to try something new out, or just about any other decision I've ever made in my life. Every choice is weighed against the life I have right now and the life I could have five minutes from now. Do I quit this job for another one or do I stay because it affords me life? Do I stay in this location or do I move across the country to see what life is like somewhere else? Even friendships get weighed this way - does this person actually add value to my life or do they make unnecessary complications, ultimately making my life worse? I won't hesitate to cut a mother fucker from my life just because. Sometimes I even have when they were people I truly cared about simply because keeping them in my life made my life worse.
I guess the biggest lesson in all this is that every person touches us in different ways. Their losses hurt. Regardless of the amount of introspection, and appreciation that introspection brings, that the loss brings, it is always going to be hard. I appreciate everything everyone in my life has been to me in my life, and that goes for everyone who is currently or has been previously in my life. What every person represents is unique to who they are, and nothing can take that away. Even so, it is all just so hard.
Just... hard.
-Dustin S. Stover
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