My Last Post on Death -- I Swear.

For the sake of my computer charger dying today... I will be brief.

We've been talking a ton about death in the last few weeks in all of my classes, Philosophy and American Lit, and I feel just genuinely relaying my experiences with it first hand.

In 2009, my dad was taken to the hospital with major pain just two days after my birthday, only a week after I became engaged to my now-husband, and diagnosed with colon cancer just three days later -- on Christmas morning, without his family even being there (doctors told him that morning, before visiting hours).  He went through several rounds of chemo, years of treatment, and in Winter of 2012, became ill with an obstruction in the bile duct within his liver.  After a few failed surgeries to relieve the blockage, Dad was brought home for home hospice, and passed away on March 8, 2013.

There have been deaths in my family, but nothing significantly close to me -- my maternal grandparents were gone well before I was born, my paternal grandfather died just after I was born and before I was old enough to even remember him, and my paternal grandmother died just before my dad after spending 20 years or so with severe Alzheimers (she hadn't remembered me in years, so it felt as if she was already gone).  Dad was different -- it was close, it was raw, and it was for a lack of better words, incredibly strange.

I'm not a severely emotional person.  I maintain the ability to really detach myself where necessary, and in order to help my family get through things, I stayed pretty rational in it all.  I view death as the inevitability it is, but I think I probably also approached it all with some hefty skepticism, disbelief, and a true inability to process its immediacy.  When it happened, we were there with him, and being in the room as someone's spirit leaves them (or consciousness, or whatever you choose to believe -- to be honest I'm not real sure myself of this), it's just an odd feeling.

No one is ever really there with you when it happens.  They are physical there, I guess, but the experience is so uniquely individual, so incomprehensible, that it's no wonder people have basically feared it since the dawn of Man.  I don't know that it's entirely warranted fear, but then again I am speaking from the perspective of a young person who feels just so far away from it.  They say "no Man is an Island," and I guess there are a lot of places that applies -- but for me, not so in death.  As far as others that are humans, we really might be alone.  That is, unless there is a 'third who walks beside us' (as the Biblical reference goes, as the resurrected Jesus walks unknown beside his disciples without detection) and guides us through it all.  But, I guess we'll all find out when it's our turn to meet Death with our own dignities, fears, reflections.

I don't really have a point here.  Just wanted to share with you my most emotional, and irrational thoughts.  Looking forward to tomorrow's final book discussion, and then moving on into Identity!