I’m no stranger to Death. It’s something that I’ve dealt with a lot professionally and personally – yet over the last 4 months, I’ve had 3 people close to me in different ways die.  I’ve been surrounded by people dealing with death for almost 5 months at this point, and the various ways in which death is handled by people.

I sat thinking about all of this for months, sometimes actively participating in funeral rites and the logistics, sometimes not. There is really nothing new to write about death. A few days ago, I had a moment of clarity after months of numbness.

I had been spending an inordinate amount of time with death in the last 4 months, dragging previous experiences into the mix, listening to the litany of loss from people around me as they mourned separate losses embodied by the same persons.

We, the living, spend more time dwelling on death than I would like to think the dead spend on the living. We bait our own traps of suffering, mourning what was and the illusion of what could have been.

The three close to me all made the world a better place on a grand scale through their lives. One did it through technology, one did it through her children, one did it through his passion and talent for music – yet all of them were more than what people knew them for, touching lives around them in ways that they didn’t understand or know. I got to see each of them through the mourning of others and what was being mourned.

They are gone.

I am here.