Every night for the past year, I lay awake, not afraid of death but a fear of loss. These break downs hurt when thinking of those I will lose before I go and those after.
I ponder how time flows across us all; I am no longer a child. No longer immortal. That my children who grow before my eyes and my parents slowly transform before me. The face in the mirror slightly changes. The hair fades.
Death again does not scare me – its life without those who have marked me to be a better person. In the end, we leave this world and return to where we came from.
We don’t remember a time before our birth, but there was. Over 13 billion years have passed since I arrived. To parents, brothers, and sisters. To cousins, aunts, and uncles, to grandparents and friends. Each one somehow managed to be. To be, in my life. To experience the good and bad of each one of their journeys.
My journey moves along as sand in an hourglass. I feel, at this halfway point, I am scared, but as my children are my guiding light in the darkness that will come. In them, I will survive, but even those lights will eventually fade. My memory will be as I never was.
This nothing. The nothing, the indescribable nothing. It is scary to think that our normal state; is nothing.
But at this moment that I write and in this moment you read these words. We are here — shouting to stay. To see the world, hold hands, fall in love, to live.
Before Life, I was. After death, I will be.