Dealing with death (Part I)

I think I keep finding myself putting off writing this blog. It is a hard one to write, but for me I think it’s necessary. There’s a lot of feelings and emotions swirling around that I’d like to get out there, although I’m not sure exactly how it will turn out.

In the last year, I’ve encountered death or the possibility of death way too closely and way too many times. It has not been easy and has forced me to look some things in the eye that I haven’t wanted to. It’s also brought up thoughts that I find myself not wanting to think. Now, I don’t mean my own death, mind you. Although obviously no one is ever assured one more day or even second on this earth, and that’s been pretty engrained in my head now as well, given the course of events over the last few months.

It all started last May, when I woke up one Sunday morning to find that I had several voicemail messages on my cell phone. Turns out one of my best friends had some sudden heart problems (completely unexpected given his young age and seemingly good health) and was in the hospital, basically in a coma. Not at all something I had expected to encounter or have to deal with, but there it was. Upon finding out about it, I think I spent the first day notifying all his friends and every day after that being a go-between, keeping everyone updated via his parents. It worked out – given that I probably know his parents slightly better than most of his local friends, that I share more friends with him than maybe anyone else, and that the hospital he was in is only 5 minutes away from where I live and work. It kept me busy – which was good for me at the time since keeping busy also meant keeping sane, given the difficulty of having to deal with the feelings of having a close friend so possibly near death and wondering if you’d taken for granted what a fixture they’d become in your life. Thankfully – my friend was very lucky, made a full recovery, and is still around to blog about it.

My next encounter with death came in the form of family. It was about a month or so after my friend wound up in the hospital. I received a phone call from my mother one day, telling me that my 38-year-old cousin in California had some heart trouble as well and was in the hospital. She had two sons, one that’s 19 and one that’s 9. And yes – I said she “had”. She didn’t fare as well as my friend, unfortunately. She was in a coma and on life support for several days – I don’t believe she even woke up after being admitted to the hospital. Even after talking to her father (my uncle) recently, there still doesn’t seem to be a simple, concrete explanation for her death. I’ve heard everything from things about medication she was on to the fact that she smoked for a long time to it just being a problem with her heart. Fact is – it was sudden, expected, and no one really got to say goodbye. She wasn’t currently married, and her mom, dad, and sister all lived in Arizona, so that’s where the funeral was. I really wanted to go, but finances prohibited it. And that was hard, not being there. This person was someone that none of the people I’m around in my day-to-day life knew, but yet someone who was related to me, someone I’d known growing up and had spent plenty of family time with. Family’s a huge thing to me, a huge tie (but that’s another blog). And yet it seemed the thing I had to do was to go on with life, as if it didn’t happen. No time off to grieve – no one, really, to grieve with. I think I really struggled with that – never feeling like I got the opportunity to really express much of what I felt about all of that.

It’s odd… I’ve never really been much of a crier before. I always found myself with dry eyes at times that I felt like I probably should be crying, or when other people around me were. I never really cried at all the sad movies that moved most people to tears. Yet that seem to change when my friend was in the hospital. It was as if it shifted something inside me. I was on the verge of possibly losing something – someone – that I never expected to lose at that point. It apparently shook me up emotionally enough that the tears began flowing more easily. It seemed like a permanent alteration in me too, as soon I found myself having another reason for the tears to fall.

[There's a part II to this, as I found myself having a lot to say. Sorry if it's depressing for some, but this is a chunk of what I've genuinely felt and dealt with the last few months.]