Anticipating Death

When you lose someone fundamental to your life at a very young age, you change as a person.

I knew what death was before my dad died. It had been explained to me in childhood why I wouldn’t be seeing my great-grandparents anymore, and at 12 years old, you don’t know a lot about the world, but you’re old enough to know that when someone has died, they’re not coming back. 

That person is gone forever from this world, and while you can comfort yourself with what may come after death, that’s after death. You are still here, and alive, and left with a festering wound left in the absence of a person you love.

You also never know how big or painful that wound will truly be until suddenly you’re sitting at a kitchen table at one in the morning with a massive cannonball-sized hole in your chest because your dad is dead. You’d been left wondering and distracting yourself for hours beforehand, but now it’s real, and there’s nothing that anyone can do to change that fact.

Your dad is dead, and he will never attend your college graduation. Or your high school one. Or even your middle

school. 

Your dad is dead, and he will never see you come into yourself and become happy. 

Your dad is dead, and he will never meet your soulmate. 

Your dad is dead, and he will never tuck you in again or apologize after a fight or come home from work or hug you and tell you that he loves you, because dead people can’t do anything, how could they when they’re dead?

Your dad is dead and suddenly so much is missing from your life. Moments and memories that can never happen now. The relationship you could’ve had if he’d committed, REALLY committed, to sobriety. 

Suddenly, every day that passes is another day you haven’t seen him, because no one has or can, and every one of those days is another day closer to the one you’ve been dreading. The day he’ll have been gone longer than you ever knew him. You see his face every time you look in the mirror, so far from this plane of existence yet forever trapped in your very DNA. It makes you sick.

The thing you don’t expect to come from losing someone so early in your life is the fear that everyone else is going to follow faster than you’re ready for. You wish it were a one-time tragedy, that the universe ripped someone so close away from you, and surely you’ve had your karmic share of grief. But the universe doesn’t work that way. And we lose, and lose, and lose.

You start looking for it eventually, in every dark corner of your life. You tell yourself horrific stories and convince yourself it’s fate. You’ve been conditioned by random fucking chance to expect death all around you, so you do all you can to prepare yourself to lose anyone and everyone you love. 

The universe is cold, and random, and unforgiving, and it takes and takes and takes. but all of that has taught you one thing that you’re still unlearning now into adulthood.

Nothing is permanent.

Nobody is permanent.

Start mourning early.

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