Speak to Me of Death

This is dedicated to Uncle Jerry who is not really my uncle but who always made a sad little girl laugh. 

Speak to me of death is a line from the book The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.  That line is the beginning of my spiritual journey.  That page in that book was the first time I looked at death as anything more than an utter and complete tragedy.  I felt my loved ones were in peace.

I want to talk about death because nobody ever wants to talk about death.  We don’t like to think of our own and we don’t like to talk about others and we don’t want to think it could happen to us. But it does happen to us every single day, someone dies and it affects everyone in their lives forever.  We can dismiss it and cry about it in the middle of the night but god forbid we talk about it.  We don’t want to admit we are vulnerable enough to be completely devastated by the loss of someone we love and the pain and the sorrow that accompanies it sometimes for a lifetime.

I’ve had a rather interesting life the last few months, I’ve gotten to see firsthand what it would be like if I were dead.  Because I was in so much pain and spiraling out of control some of my friends had to write me off, literally and figuratively because it was too painful to be around my living body.  My coffee cup sat in my sink for a month and a half after I spiraled out of control and ran away, my dog sat by the door every day waiting for me to come back and it took everything of beauty out of the lives of those who loved me most.  I became someone that people dream about, like we dream about our dead loved ones.  They are no longer with us so we dream.

I’m very fortunate, I’m alive.  I get a second chance for however long it lasts.  I get a chance to start over, fall in love again, make beautiful art and write blogs.  But for so many there is no second chance, God wants them and that is all there is to it.  We have to be there for those who are left behind because loss leaves a legacy that sometimes takes a lifetime to get over. 

Times are really tough at the moment and people need to know the legacy they leave behind when they take their own lives.  They leave a family full of shattered people wondering what they could have done to stop them.  They leave a coffee cup in the sink, a message on an answering machine, a lifelong relationship with a ghost.  If you have children it is even worse for they cannot process grief the way adults can, they carry the ghosts and the fear of the ghosts around every single day of their lives.  Life is a precious gift, if you fit into this category I just mentioned, don’t do it.  Go find help, go find love, move somewhere else find peace in your soul and share that with your children.  Go to rehab, go find a psychiatrist, send me an email.  I dealt with ghosts all my life and they are probably the reason I spiraled out of control. 

This is too heavy for me to continue but I will say find a life, find a love, appreciate your life, and find yourself before the coffee cup stays and the friends disappear.  Love is the answer.