How to Deal with the Fact that Everyone We Love Will Die Someday

There's obviously a degree of pragmatism built into the human psyche, which enables us to carry on each day while somehow completely ignoring life's largest and most alarming truths. Yes, everything is meaningless, and we find ourselves floating about on a speck in an infinite universe, and we have no real idea how any of this came about, yet, for a time, one can manage to focus all their attention and care on the fact that they're running late to their morning shift at the grocery store. But every now and then these truths sweep over our awareness, and in an instant, the whole world becomes unrecognizable.

I don't find the saddest fact of life to be that we will all die someday, but it is something related to it: There will come a day when each of us will be separated for all eternity from everyone we love. It immediately turns every ounce of love I feel into fear. Chains, invisible and unbreakable, are dragging them all away from me with each tick of the clock, and I'm completely powerless to do anything about it. I can't foresee when or how it'll happen, but I'm unfortunate enough to have certain knowledge that it will eventually happen.

Either life is abundant enough with joys, or I am naturally optimistic enough to counter the darkness, that I tend to find my way around these difficult realities to a happy conclusion. But this one has always stopped me in my tracks. As a parade of images go across my mind of all those I hold dear - family, friends, lovers, and even my beloved pet - and I have to imagine how one by one either I or them will exit this place forever, and leave behind an object, a husk, a corpse, and nothing more, I am at a loss at how to contend with it.

I thought that was it, that I had to swallow hard and hold onto a sad truth, a truth that made this life seem like something of an insidious torture, but it was when I surrendered to it completely that I came to a realization that turned the issue on its head. As I tried with great pains to accept that this one fact would sour all of life, I asked myself, "Is this life so miserable then that, if I had been given the choice, I would decide to never have lived in the first place, and maybe never have had them live as well?" It's here that the void clears and all of the rest comes rushing in. It is not all death and separation. That is a heavy weight, an immovable object that sits menacingly on life's horizon, but there is something just as heavy on the opposite side of the scale.

To avoid the grim prospect of that final separation, would I give up in exchange that one night when, after days of arguing over the phone, we decided at a moment's notice to drive to meet each other in some random parking lot, and she ran to me with such abandon that she broke both the heels on her shoes in the process, just to embrace me and reassure me of her love? Would I exchange it for all those quiet nights in front of the TV, the boring ones that passed without appreciation, because a deep and solemn peace is so still that you hardly ever notice it as it happens, though you miss it like nothing else once it's gone? Even with my silly little cat that I lavish attention on so excessively, to preclude that heart-wrenching last day together, would I trade the evening when I felt at my lowest and she sauntered into my room, looking as if she owned the place with a confidence so completely unearned, that it turned my mood in an instant without her having the slightest intention of doing so? I was given a flake of gold on so many days that I now carry a mountain of the stuff with me, in my mind and in my heart, and with that even the shadow of death looming over me at all times will find it hard to convince me that life was not worth living.

So she will go, and I will go, and they will go, but we were here once. We brought smiles to each other's faces, and embraced so tightly you could feel it in your core. We got drunk to music so wonderfully composed it made one question if any human could have made it without the help of divine inspiration. We read sentences that carried in their syllables such absolute beauty, truth, and goodness that it lit a flame inside a part of us we didn't know had been unlit until then. I was given a thousand sunsets with you, and now I want to complain and lose myself to some existential depression?

Night's pinholed veil, golden aureoles at the dawn, gems gestating in clay, whips of light cracking through the air, a hillside blanketed with wildflowers, the ocean's edge sloshing on a coastline, trees ornamented with apples and cherries - all of these are mine. And what is death? It is black, dull, nothing, painless.

How many heavens have we each been given? A single hell hereafter would still leave us with the advantage. Yet, we complain of death, of an absolute anesthetic. The hardest thing I'll ever have to do is surrender them all up to unstoppable time, but they were a reward that death can never match. They were, all of those countless moments, fragments of God, and it is that I carry with me. It is that I pass through with each movement, and that which passes through me as I sit still. It flows between us when our eyes meet and our skins touch. It governs my mind and body and gives me this day, and all the days past, and whatever days I shall be blessed to have in the future. I return to it my being, and yours, and all I love, and I do it gratefully. Death is abhorrent. It is a foul invention, and if there were anyway I could give my life to preserve theirs, or spend all my days employed in such a way that it would offer just one more day to any of them, I would, but if this is our inexorable fate, then I need only remember that this most unfortunate piece of the whole is not the whole, nor the half, nor anything but the goodbye and the curtain close. Everything else was sublime.

The worst moments I spent alongside each of them would be worth reliving on repeat over and over again for a lifetime. The unassuming car rides with playful banter and the soothing vibrations of the road to pass the time were everything. The times we joked with each other while waiting in line, or working through our weekly chores, or as I walked you to the door on your way to work, they were all priceless, and they only passed without due reverence because of an overabundance. I haven't a sufficient capacity for joy to respond as is deserved to each second by their side.

Like a child, I forget all that I've been given, and am constantly given, and get lost in petulant and petty dismay for a moment or for a day - or forgive me, sometimes for even longer. And it's here that I can can recognize some slight positive about death. Would we ever have this moment, you and I, to reflect on the true value of what it means to be alive and to love, and to taste and see and hear and feel, and to do all of those things with another, if we didn't have to reckon with the fact that it is only here for a time. I do not ask for death under any terms, not for me or for any other, but life is so excessively generous that it can put a silver lining on even that darkest of figures. Putrid death urges us towards a deeper appreciation of life, and thereby gives to life an extra degree of vibrancy.

It is the saddest fact I can think of: Me and everyone I love will be separated from each other for all eternity in death. I often felt like that overwhelming truth would hold me under a pressure I couldn't escape from. I thought it was the one truth I could never wrestle with and was something I simply had to avoid lest I succumb to misery for however long I remained consciously aware of it. But I will frame it for you here in a way so that you can understand it in its true context and that will expel the sadness completely and in an instant. You see, death is a stench, it's carrion on a hot road, or a maggot writhing about in wet soil. It's disgusting and despicable, and the world would be better off without it. But what exactly is death? Ultimately, it's a negative. It's nothing. It's the absence of something else, and that something is life. If we fear death, if we detest and loathe it, if we'd scratch out our eyes to keep it from ourselves and our loved ones, if we're distraught because it has claimed someone we held near to our heart, then all of that is to say that we must truly love its opposite. Any negative feelings towards death are affirmations of our feelings towards life.

Life is so deeply wonderful, even at its worst, that I cannot help but smile in the face of that harshest realization. Life is glorious to such an impossible extent that even the end of it can look like a gift - by virtue that for there to be an end something must have preceded it. Death implies life. Death is defined in relation to life and requires life. For this, we can welcome even death.

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