We Must Live With Death

We must live with comfort in the specter of death. The more we live the more we must walk among the memories we hold which death leaves behind and come to terms with our perception in navigating its shadows. Think: When you die, do you want your family and friends to walk about miserable? atrophying in yearning and sadness? maybe for a little. But don't you, rather, as you're living, get your absolute life when your loved ones come back in your presence to recall, eyes glowing and full of life, their experiences and passions and loves and adventures? The longer we live the more death we must navigate. Truth: Death is for the living (and "never a convenient visitor" Dan Ade+), for the dead are too blissful in peace to care for our sadness. And if the relationship before death was complicated, what good is going through that drawer again. Nothing we do can affect the past. What is always best is to collect the most precious, life-giving moments, and stitch those golden threads in to the quilt we'll leave behind when it's our time to move on to That Heavenly Country. Yes, there is a hole death leaves, there is an emptiness, but those are the joining borders between each square of our quilt. "Oh, but for one more phone call, one more dinner, one more hug." But you know one more is never enough; we want a lifetime of those moments. So...we must pick ourselves up, make the ache a part of our breath, live with the empty, and love again, with more vigor, with abandon, because we must one day come back into their presence to recall, eyes glowing and full of life, experiences and passions and loves and adventures ... not with a life unlived because we were too sad to live it.

<...and if there’s a reason I’m still alive when everyone who loves me has died I’m willing to wait for it...> - Hamilton the Musical