Learning how to die

Those we walk with in life sometimes we lose them and they are no longer there for us to walk alongside. Sometimes their friendship is so sweet, their path in life so inspiring, their choices so selfless that the remembrance of their life brings to mind good things, kindness, laughter, giving out to others, gentleness of spirit and much love.

Death to me, seems like the hardest thing to make seem real. Of course it is a most real thing, it is most continuous in our physical experience in life, it does not get undone just yet. The absence that comes with death continues for the rest of life. My mind finds death very hard to comprehend – when most grotesquely and physically involved in death, in very close proximity, or when very far reading about it in headlines and watching it on the news, my mind still finds death hard to believe. I don’t believe in death when it is there. I don’t believe in death when it is close, in my arms, mouth to mouth but I no more believe in it when it is internationally recognised and on the television or when I am watching bodies buried in the ground.

Sudden and utter absence is my experience of death. Gone-ness. Gone for ever-ness. No more. Not coming back. Not to be seen again. Death.

Very hard to comprehend.

Jon Foreman – Learning how to die

‘I’m gonna miss you,

I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone.

She says “I love you, I’m gonna miss hearing your songs.”

And I said “Please don’t talk about the end,

Don’t talk about how every living thing goes away.”

She said “Friend, all along thought I was learning how to take,

How to bend not to break,

How to live not to cry,

Really I’ve been learning how to die,

Been learning how to die.”

These people we walk amongst, sometimes they teach us how we should live so that dying doesn’t seem like the worst because the living was done so well, not a drop wasted, nothing held back that should have been given, no blessing left unsaid.