Death changes everything

One of the oddest things about death is how we all come face-to-face with it, time and time again, yet it is still the most overwhelming thing one can face. Its universality does nothing to dim the pain or make us feel anymore prepared for the reach of its effects.

Something changes in your core the first time someone close to you dies. A little bit of idealism disappears. The darkest of possibilities settles itself at the back of your mind.

I was lucky enough to live a fairly charmed childhood in this regard, with no one except for distant relatives and friends of friends of friends passing away.

It was a Tuesday morning, a month before I was set to graduate high school. My boyfriend was home sick that day, and I was contemplating asking my friend Malonie whether I could skip out of the meeting the two of us had (as we were both peer helpers) during my spare block so I could surprise him. As we pulled up to the front of the school, I noticed two of my friends hugging, one of them crying. Another friend made a snide remarks about one of the girls having got into yet another fight with her boyfriend.
It became clear that is was more by the sharpness of the pain in their eyes as we walked towards them. I felt all the breath leave my body when the words "Malonie's dead" were thrown out into space.

One of the things that people seem to cling in these cases is the nature of their last memory with the person. It can be overwhelming how unexceptional it may be, and you desperately replay it in your mind, looking for some sort of significance, some sort of sign that doesn't exist.

Another thing that struck me especially hard was the fact that the tragedy that had grabbed me by the throat was so generic to the rest of the world. The day it happened, for reasons that are fuzzy now, several of my friends and I went to the mall-- perhaps to buy some food or flowers. At this point, I had cried what felt like every ounce of emotion out of me, and was feeling dissociated and numb. However, I was pulled back to reality when I realized the women beside me in line were talking about Malonie's death in such disconnected terms. The words were there: "Isn't it awful? There was a really bad car accident and I heard a girl died". But the emotion wasn't. They didn't know her. She was just another anonymous tragedy, the one that people pause for a second to reflect upon, but then quickly move past. I wanted to scream at them for their callousness for just talking about her so casually as I stood there suffocating beside them. I wanted to throw my memories in their faces to make them understand how real it all was.

It's been over 8 years now, and I still get overwhelmed by the shift in perspective it has brought upon me. Although I casually pondered death before, I never contemplated in such a way. It becomes a real possibility now. I imagine what would happen if a car just didn't stop at the intersection as I was crossing. I spontaneously imagine the death of a loved one and consider it in detail. Mortality just feels so much more salient and obvious now.

The unpredictability scares me more than anything. It is the sound of my sister suddenly screaming when the voice on the line tells her that Vince has drowned. It is in the late night phone call sobbing that Charlie had completed what was normally a teenage rite of passage in leaping off the big bridge into the lake, and never came up again. It is in the email from Sarah's husband that she has passed away in her sleep, and was gone before I even sent her my last email. It is in the fact that nothing can prepare you for that moment, and you have no idea that everything has changed until that one simple second.

The remaining idealist in me says that the solution is to live every moment as though it was my last. The realist in me knows that is an impossible standard. And now I wonder whether it is more painful to try to expect death, so it can't ambush me again, or to keep on living as though it may not be hiding behind the next corner.