Death

"Death Comes For Us All"


I’ve been putting this off, hinting at it but never facing it head on. I have an afternoon free, so why not. Death and life seem intermingled. You can’t have one without the other it seems. I’ve been lucky. Some people have literally lost their entire families to death. I’ve figuratively lost most of my family to differences in beliefs and the great adage “agree to disagree”, but there are certain things you just can’t do that about. Like whether two of the same gender can marry or if there are more than two genders to begin with. Hell is their trump card. Killing someone in an accident was my trump card, and someone in Partial unfazed surpassed it and then shut down without any more information. So there is more pain out there than what you believe there is. I’ve met people who have lost their child. Lost their brother. Lost their spouse. As “Agatha All Along” points out “Death comes for us all.”

For me, death first came for my sister who I never met. I was a comfort baby. My parents had a miscarriage, and I was their consolation prize. Instead of having beautiful Yvette, Mark was born several months later. The first death I remember was my uncle Jay. Not much was said around his death that I remember, but that might be because I was so small. I remember the sadness.

I probably am skipping deaths, but my mother’s death overshadows a lot. More than anything, her death left a hole that I guess my father assumed between God and his new girlfriend, it would just be patched over as best as could be done. I don’t blame him for throwing himself more into work or me withdrawing more into myself after that. I learned that people couldn’t be trusted. Even the good ones would eventually leave you, even in death. Love turned to cynicism. My teenage rebellion was less a rebellion and more a depression mixed with a hatred of everything, and my dad took the brunt of it. It was easy to blame him for trying to swap out mom for Robyn.

It was like I finally tried to get over my mom’s death with therapy and meds when I was in a car accident of my own, with my passenger dying. Another hole for me to try to fill with work this time, but the depression and anxiety got worse, and introducing PTSD, the meds and therapy every day couldn’t keep up, so I ended up in the psych ward for a few days, and even then, they treated it like it was barely a hiccup in my life. Just needed to get me back up to “normal”, but I knew then that I was broken. It just took a few years of unemployment and part-time work for me to work up to full-time work again. And I really thought I was ready for full-time work again!

The first four or five years I hardly warmed up to anyone. Then I started warming up to people, which caused other people to start hating me or being envious of me or something. Then one of the people I was closest to developed health issues, took a few days off, and then we read her obituary on Facebook on a Saturday. Monday, they got the group together, said there was a number to call if you needed someone to talk to or they were there, otherwise get back to work. And that was the last it was discussed.

How do you just go back to work when someone dies?

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