Sunday, October 12, 2008

some serious sadness

Forgive me for being a bit depressing, but I need an outlet for some big life/death thoughts and hey, it's my blog, right?
*sigh*
It's been a long year of really sad and tragic events for quite a few people I know. A number of friends of mine have suffered completely senseless and utterly devastating losses lately and it's kind of doing a number on me. I just keep wondering,

"how could something like this happen to him/her?" and
"what's keeping these things from happening to me/my family?"

I'm really not good with the whole death thing in general, and while it's immensely inspiring to see people's faith in there being something greater after our physical bodies are gone, I personally really struggle with what I believe in regard to all of that. I have said numerous times this year "Oh my god, I would not be able to go on if that happened to my sister/brother/mom/husband/child" and someone always responds, "Oh, yes you would. You'd have to, and you just would." Well, I'm not so sure about that. I have an extremely vivid imagination and I've imagined losing a sibling or Andrew or Sadie and I get a knot in my stomach, a burning lump in my throat and tears in my eyes just thinking about it, so I really can't imagine what I'd do if I did lose someone close to me.
I don't want to think about it, but for some reason, I feel like I'm past the point of being able to trip merrily along in my life as if I don't have a care in the world. It's like with each passing day lately, I'm made more and more profoundly aware of (and you'll have to excuse the glaring cliche here) how precious life is.

So there's the lesson, right? I'm supposed to see all this tremendous heartache and suffering around me and then be more grateful for all that I have, right? Sure. I get that. But it still sucks. There, I said it. It just sucks so so so very much that my friend lost her sister and nephew, my friend lost her mom, my friend lost one of her sons, my friend lost her brother, my friend miscarried her first baby, etc. I definitely feel fortunate that I haven't been struck with an acute tragedy (yet?) but I find it very hard to be the sunny, upbeat person that I like to be when there is so much pain happening all around me.
I suppose it just goes with the whole "growing up" thing. Okay, I'm an adult. I'm married, I have a child. It's not about me anymore; I have the ultimate responsibility now. I get it. But I just feel like someone turned up the intensity knob on life. It's as if I'm hearing the refrain "enjoy it while you've got it" over and over again in my head. And I know that's a valuable lesson, but I resent it! It feels heavy and gloomy and ominous. It makes me just that much more stressed about what could happen at any given moment to knock my life off the happy track that I've been riding for so long.

So...*sigh*...what am I getting at? I don't know. This is essentially just a brain dump and a major ramble. I know that we never know what's around the corner for us and we shouldn't take a single moment of our lives for granted, so I guess I just need to try to live life to the fullest and make sure that my loved ones know how very much I love them. It sounds so dramatic, doesn't it? That's just the headspace I'm in right now. And after all, even though I went to a heartwrenching funeral today, I also just celebrated my grandma's 90th birthday yesterday.

Clearly life can be very long and full so I guess I'll try to focus on that.