Fear

Today I lost a friend. If there is a Heaven, I guess I should say was separated from a friend as she most certainly would have transcended this life into whatever passes for a Heaven, but she is still lost and so too will the world be lost without her.

Some people pass too early, and some last longer than they should, fighting to the very end. Most lives are good and yet eclipsed most noticeably by those lives gone terribly astray which scream out for headlines while the best of the good exist in obscurity from the world, but not their friends and family. All people, though, must meet the ultimate end in their own way and will either account for their deeds in front of the Judge, or they will leave behind the karma of their good deeds should there be no ultimate Judge of existence, and yet they will all still leave behind a world of the rest of us.

Left behind we simply continue moving forward without much choice in the matter. We are saddened in the moment, some of us for the rest of our trips around the sun. But we all move on and eventually the world still struggles against gravity toward a future certain to be filled with more death. And yet it is not the death itself we mourn, it is the loss that exists within each of us when a small part of our own soul is taken away until eventually we are stripped down to the nothingness of what faces us in the mirror.

So often in this life, we spend so much time in pursuit of the superficiality of existence we lose sight of the importance of existence. We buy nice clothes. We buy cars. We buy scotch. We buy expensive maintenance creams for our faces. We try to keep everyone from noticing that we are getting old. I guess we feel that if we can hide the truth, then the truth changes. If there are no lines on my face, no gray in my hair, no baldness on my head, I must not really be old. If I am strong, in good physical condition, then I must not be old. We spend our days convincing ourselves that the future is bold and we ignore the reality of existence; death is the only inevitable. Not death and taxes; death.

That is a scary thought not because we fear death itself, but because death means we no longer exist. That ‘thing’ that makes me who I am, that makes the world what it is, that thing will be gone. Every day I wake up grateful for that day, but to think of pure non-existence is scary. So I hide from the truth. I bury my head in a weight room; in words; in keeping those things which hide the inevitability of death. I plan for a future where work is no longer necessary ignoring the fact that shortly after I no longer need to work, that inevitability is so much closer.

Today I lost a friend. Each day I will lose a little bit more of myself inching ever so close to the inevitability I have spent an entire lifetime fearing. Is there a Heaven? I do not know. I hope so, but I cannot know. If there is, then there are a lot of good souls up there watching over us as we pass step-by-step closer to joining them. If, however, there is not a Heaven, well, then we are inching those steps into the abyss of nothing. Nothing. I fear being nothing. I fear ending up as nothing.