Do You Remember?

Every day, someone dies. Several someones, in fact. A mother. A father. A sister, brother, cousin, aunt, uncle, grandpa, grandma, daughter, son. A baby. A senior citizen. A new bride. A high school student. A drug dealer. They all disappear, Houdini's final trick.

It happens all the time, and yet when it happens close to us, we panic. We freak. We say, Oh my God, how could it happen to THEM? But we don't even realize that right now, at this very moment, the same thing is happening in about a hundred other places all across the country, even more across the whole planet. Our perspective is skewed by our juxtaposition to the event. But is that such a bad thing?

I recently lost my paternal grandmother. I purposely didn't share this information with most people, people at school, various extended family members, etc. because I didn't want to have them do the same thing that we all do: Oh my God, how terrible! on the surface; but secretly, Wow glad it wasn't me. I didn't want to give them that satisfaction, that little moment of instinctual gloating. It seemed so disgraceful to me, so barbaric. But then I thought about it in the context of my previous statements: they only reacted that way because they didn't think about things in a universal sense. They saw what happened to someone near them and breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn't them, they didn't have to deal with it. They ignored the inevitable for one more day.

I guess my point is not quite brought across in that last paragraph, so let me make it more clear: the fact that things happen all over the globe shouldn't belittle our feelings when it happens to us. Who knows how many other grandmothers died the same day as mine, but that doesn't mean that I should push aside my feelings and avoid sharing my pain with others. Certainly, their reaction is the typical ingrained human kind, but that doesn't make it any less genuine.

I still don't talk about my grandmother, or my maternal grandfather, or my uncle, or my great-aunt, or my great-grandfather, or my dad's best friend. I don't talk about the people that I've lost, because I still feel like it's something that others don't deserve to gloat about. And I suppose I also feel guilty sharing it. But I often remember what few snapshots and smiles I had with them. And I find that that's talk enough for me.

Ramblin Writer

Well, I suppose I should try to update this more than once a year, eh? Of course, on the other hand, nobody reads it but me, so I'll just update whenever I feel like reading something from myself.

I thought about deleting some of my older posts, when I first got on here. The very first few, for example. They're absolutely rotten and so riddled with teen angst they're practically a chapter of Twilight. (Oh! Humor! That's new!) But then I realized that each of those posts is a little piece of me. A dreadful, horribly written, self-loating piece of me.

I think we try to delete pieces of ourselves as we go through life. We look back at a certain time or action and we think "Ugh, how terrible! I'll just forget about that." But the problem is that when we start deleting parts of ourselves like that, after a while we start to repeat those actions or attitudes. We forget about the consequences, we forget that we even did it, and then suddenly we're doing it again and we go "Shit. Been here, done this. Idiot."

The truth is, the more little pieces of ourselves we get rid of, the more of the whole of ourselves we're deteriorating. There comes a point where we have to just embrace ourselves, past, present, and future as a whole. Take in all the mistakes we've made, and hope we can apply what we've learned in future situations. Because after all, isn't that what life's about? Making mistakes. Learning to love yourself. Enjoying the ride.

Well, this is a short post, but I'm going to be trying to update more frequently (I'm pretty sure I've said that before), and hopefully that will be easier if I can get my hands on that Blackberry Curve I've been eyeing. Fingers crossed!