I have been thinking of mortality this weekend, not my
own…well, not really. Maybe just a little bit. I have been wondering more about
when and how I or you begin to think of our own mortality and why.
When any of us are young, we don’t think that our lives will
ever end. We don’t think there is even a possibility of our lives ending. We
just live every day and during that day we laugh, cry, eat, play, drink, learn,
sleep and then repeat those several times over. Our concern is totally in the now
and tomorrow is just something that adults talk about. When something happens
that is different than our normal routine we revert to one of the seven things
we do so very well.
We age just a little and the need to plan becomes more
important. It is a rare teacher that will go for the “I live in the moment and
the homework just isn’t in the moment stuff.” We need to plan our play a little
better because it is always much more fun to play with someone else. We learn a
little about mortality if a pet fish or fido happens to pass on. We learn about
cause and effect when we find an ant hill on a sunny day when we are holding a
magnifying lens. Sometimes, we lose a grand parent. I don’t think we can grasp
mortality at a young age; they just aren’t around any more, maybe on a
vacation.
A little older and we lose a good friend to some senseless
accident or an even more senseless disease. We band together and share our
grief with others which somehow makes it better and worse at the same time. The
memories stay with us for the rest of our lives and even when that friend is a
faded memory, the grief is still a very real feeling, unaffected by the passage
of time.
Older still and we lose a parent. A very sizeable chunk of
your life is taken away. All of the childhood memories, the lessons, spankings,
laughter, road trips, and family get togethers. Christmas and birthdays will no
longer have the anchor of that missing parent. This is the time when you
realize that perhaps you just may pass away some day.
Friends start to get old and sick, some pass from their
illnesses and their mortality and yours become a part of the whole experience
of life. The sadness that once accompanied a death is greeted with a
resignation of the inevitability of this being a part of life. You have your
own aches and pains and you know that at some point you too will get ill. It is
part of being a mortal being.
What happens at the end? That is one question that you have
to answer for yourself. We are all just time travellers and like all journeys
this one has to end. Some journeys are longer, some are more exciting, some
make a big splash and some barely a ripple.
All are the same in the end and if we are lucky we exit
accompanied by the love of those whose lives we touched.
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