I REALLY HOPE you take the time to read this...
I was lying in bed at some ungodly hour of the morning this morning, wide awake and contemplating the state of the universe. And as I was lying there, i was going over the last nine monthes of my life and realizing that I have absolutely no idea where they went. I don't know why, but this place that I have been has made me realize myself so much. Anyway I could go on about this year forever, but what I was really thinking about was friendship.
You know how they say that your friends are the family that you get to choose? Well I think that in many instances, friends are not family. It takes ALOT to love someone unconditionally. To know them so well and have been through so much with them, that you would stand by them and love them for any reason. Have you ever thought about a friend, and for no reason just got a deep feeling in the depths of your insides and your stomach, like the butterflies only like, heavier and more emotional? It's a feeling like if that friend was right there with you, you would hug them so hard that you could break them. It's like you know, without any doubt in your mind, that there will never be another person that knows you in the way that they do? Not just like, "ohh you know me so well we finish eachothers sentences and we share all our clothes and talk for hours bla bla bla", but like, a feeling that if somehow you went mute and you could never speak words to them again, they would be able to communicate with you just as well. They would read your smile and hear your silence and breath your laughter so that you never had to feel like you were alone. A feeling that when something bad happens to them in their life, it changes you. It changes the way you think and act about certain things. Well I felt that. And I realized how powerful that feeling is. It's so unbreakable, so immortal. And it got me thinking about death, and what I would do or say if a person who made me feel like that were suddenly gone from this life. And then I had these thought, a personal epiphany I guess you would say.
Almost two monthes ago I almost died. I almost became a teenage, college statistic on the floor of my friend's dorm room. I lost oxygen, my lungs almost stopped functioning on their own. My skin turned yellow. My hair was matted with vomit and my memory went dead. From 9:15 pm on March 3 to around 4am on March 4, I was literally lifeless. No amount of talking can bring back any memories of what happened, from smashing my head off of every piece of furniture in the room, to being carried out of the building strapped to a chair, to having tubes connected to every orifice of my body and needles and monitors and everything else hooked up to my patheticly near dead body. When I finally woke up, I saw my mom and my sister. I felt the tubes in my nose and the mask on my face and I knew that somehow, my wrecklessness had caught up with me. I was still pretty incoherent as a .34 BAC takes a while to get itself back down to a level further from the glaring red danger of fatality zone. But I knew that the worst feeling in the world was the feeling that I had made my family wonder if they were ever going to see me open my eyes again. It wrenched my guts from the inside out. The only thing I could say to her was "I'm sorry you had to see me like this." Later my mom told me that my sister had stood over me, hitting my face and yelling at me to try to get me to wake up. She hadn't cried or gotten hysterical in her Mikaela-like way. She came in with the purpose of keeping me alive. I can't imagine seeing her like that, and wondering if my best friend was ever going to be with me again. And after all of it happened, it became real to me. Just how much my life affected others. Not even just my family. I think that's maybe when I realized how to truly feel love, deep and true love, for a friend.
I talked to my best friend on the phone a few nights later and told her what happened. And when she went to respond, her voice was choked up and she was crying. I hadn't even talked to her for 5 minutes, or explained all the gory details, and yet just the words "I almost died" were enough to make her feel scared. Later on I talked to another friend here. His reaction was different, yet just as compelling and powerful. One of these people I have known for almost four years. One I have known for almost 8 monthes. And I lay in my bed, and tried to imagine being faced with the death of these two people. I know it sounds morbid, but we all have done that to ourselves before. It's scary. But it is a reality that someday we might have to deal with that. And I thought, what would I say? How would I deal with it. How would I be able to get through it? And I guess that is where the epiphany about death comes in
When we die, it is the end of our physical and tangible communication with the other life forms on this earth. But our coexistance with this world and this life never leaves. When you look at a pictur eof someone who has past, you should not see their death. You should not see their absence. That picture shows them living life...being alive...being. Maybe they are kissing their lover, or lying on the beach or tickling their children or blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. But whatever they are doing, that picture is a piece of evidence that they lived, and are still living in the ways that they have left a mark on each person who remembers them. Each person who saw them blow out the candles or who rubbed aloe on the sunburn or who recieved the kiss. That is so real. And memories, they are not just intangible, one dimensional thoughts. They are another piece of evidence. They are proof that someone is still alive, that their soul and energy still passes through this world. It passes through the butterflies you got when they touched you, or the tears you cried when they fought with you, or the sound of your laughter together. All of those things, tears and laughter and hugs and kisses and singing and whispering, all of it is ALWAYS real and always alive. That, I think, is the miracle of life after death. How can you say that someone is dead, that their soul stopped existing after their heart just happened to stop beating? What about everything that they left, every person that they loved or hated, everything that their life touched that is left affected? A person's influence in this life doens't even begin to go away once their body is buried or their ashes are spread. We are all intellgent thinkers, maybe even scientific skeptics of religion. Well you can set aside religion. Just look at the reality of all of it. The very instant that our presence in someone else's life affects them, we have become immortal. We have ensured that an eternal legacy has been left. And even if that person that we affected dies, they legacy that they leave behind is determined by the people that have influenced them in their lifetime, and so it is a cycle in which our miniscule, blip of a presence on this world is actually eternal. Maybe there is a heaven, maybe there isn't. Or maybe it isn't what we think. But no matter, because I truly believe that our spirit does not die with our body, but lives on in every piece of life on earth that we were a part of.
That is the peace of mind I want to give people who mourn the loss of a friend, or family member. Because, being someone who has lost many people, I believe with every fiber in my being that everything I just said is true and real. I have lived it and felt it and experienced it, and I know that people who are "gone" are never really gone. That is the miracle of life after death. This poem below has always been my favorite poem about death, and now I know why. It symbolizes my entire philosophy. Maybe it was even my inspiration for coming up with all of this. But I'd like to leave it for you to contemplate.
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
You know how they say that your friends are the family that you get to choose? Well I think that in many instances, friends are not family. It takes ALOT to love someone unconditionally. To know them so well and have been through so much with them, that you would stand by them and love them for any reason. Have you ever thought about a friend, and for no reason just got a deep feeling in the depths of your insides and your stomach, like the butterflies only like, heavier and more emotional? It's a feeling like if that friend was right there with you, you would hug them so hard that you could break them. It's like you know, without any doubt in your mind, that there will never be another person that knows you in the way that they do? Not just like, "ohh you know me so well we finish eachothers sentences and we share all our clothes and talk for hours bla bla bla", but like, a feeling that if somehow you went mute and you could never speak words to them again, they would be able to communicate with you just as well. They would read your smile and hear your silence and breath your laughter so that you never had to feel like you were alone. A feeling that when something bad happens to them in their life, it changes you. It changes the way you think and act about certain things. Well I felt that. And I realized how powerful that feeling is. It's so unbreakable, so immortal. And it got me thinking about death, and what I would do or say if a person who made me feel like that were suddenly gone from this life. And then I had these thought, a personal epiphany I guess you would say.
Almost two monthes ago I almost died. I almost became a teenage, college statistic on the floor of my friend's dorm room. I lost oxygen, my lungs almost stopped functioning on their own. My skin turned yellow. My hair was matted with vomit and my memory went dead. From 9:15 pm on March 3 to around 4am on March 4, I was literally lifeless. No amount of talking can bring back any memories of what happened, from smashing my head off of every piece of furniture in the room, to being carried out of the building strapped to a chair, to having tubes connected to every orifice of my body and needles and monitors and everything else hooked up to my patheticly near dead body. When I finally woke up, I saw my mom and my sister. I felt the tubes in my nose and the mask on my face and I knew that somehow, my wrecklessness had caught up with me. I was still pretty incoherent as a .34 BAC takes a while to get itself back down to a level further from the glaring red danger of fatality zone. But I knew that the worst feeling in the world was the feeling that I had made my family wonder if they were ever going to see me open my eyes again. It wrenched my guts from the inside out. The only thing I could say to her was "I'm sorry you had to see me like this." Later my mom told me that my sister had stood over me, hitting my face and yelling at me to try to get me to wake up. She hadn't cried or gotten hysterical in her Mikaela-like way. She came in with the purpose of keeping me alive. I can't imagine seeing her like that, and wondering if my best friend was ever going to be with me again. And after all of it happened, it became real to me. Just how much my life affected others. Not even just my family. I think that's maybe when I realized how to truly feel love, deep and true love, for a friend.
I talked to my best friend on the phone a few nights later and told her what happened. And when she went to respond, her voice was choked up and she was crying. I hadn't even talked to her for 5 minutes, or explained all the gory details, and yet just the words "I almost died" were enough to make her feel scared. Later on I talked to another friend here. His reaction was different, yet just as compelling and powerful. One of these people I have known for almost four years. One I have known for almost 8 monthes. And I lay in my bed, and tried to imagine being faced with the death of these two people. I know it sounds morbid, but we all have done that to ourselves before. It's scary. But it is a reality that someday we might have to deal with that. And I thought, what would I say? How would I deal with it. How would I be able to get through it? And I guess that is where the epiphany about death comes in
When we die, it is the end of our physical and tangible communication with the other life forms on this earth. But our coexistance with this world and this life never leaves. When you look at a pictur eof someone who has past, you should not see their death. You should not see their absence. That picture shows them living life...being alive...being. Maybe they are kissing their lover, or lying on the beach or tickling their children or blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. But whatever they are doing, that picture is a piece of evidence that they lived, and are still living in the ways that they have left a mark on each person who remembers them. Each person who saw them blow out the candles or who rubbed aloe on the sunburn or who recieved the kiss. That is so real. And memories, they are not just intangible, one dimensional thoughts. They are another piece of evidence. They are proof that someone is still alive, that their soul and energy still passes through this world. It passes through the butterflies you got when they touched you, or the tears you cried when they fought with you, or the sound of your laughter together. All of those things, tears and laughter and hugs and kisses and singing and whispering, all of it is ALWAYS real and always alive. That, I think, is the miracle of life after death. How can you say that someone is dead, that their soul stopped existing after their heart just happened to stop beating? What about everything that they left, every person that they loved or hated, everything that their life touched that is left affected? A person's influence in this life doens't even begin to go away once their body is buried or their ashes are spread. We are all intellgent thinkers, maybe even scientific skeptics of religion. Well you can set aside religion. Just look at the reality of all of it. The very instant that our presence in someone else's life affects them, we have become immortal. We have ensured that an eternal legacy has been left. And even if that person that we affected dies, they legacy that they leave behind is determined by the people that have influenced them in their lifetime, and so it is a cycle in which our miniscule, blip of a presence on this world is actually eternal. Maybe there is a heaven, maybe there isn't. Or maybe it isn't what we think. But no matter, because I truly believe that our spirit does not die with our body, but lives on in every piece of life on earth that we were a part of.
That is the peace of mind I want to give people who mourn the loss of a friend, or family member. Because, being someone who has lost many people, I believe with every fiber in my being that everything I just said is true and real. I have lived it and felt it and experienced it, and I know that people who are "gone" are never really gone. That is the miracle of life after death. This poem below has always been my favorite poem about death, and now I know why. It symbolizes my entire philosophy. Maybe it was even my inspiration for coming up with all of this. But I'd like to leave it for you to contemplate.
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.