Ruminating on Death Pt. I

I learned of another death of a person that was connected to my life in various threads throughout. I met her as a younger child through my mom’s after school program. She was always super talkative and sarcastically funny for a 1st or 2nd grader. Then, she spent a brief amount of time in my apartment when I was living some sort of club kid fantasy over 10 years ago. My roommate at the time invited her and a couple of other friends to stay at my place. Our lives had always run just adjacent, a close friend of a handful of my younger sister’s friends.

It’s weird these tenuously fleeting connections you have with people throughout your life. My beliefs dictate that there is no afterlife. That “you” return to the flow of consciousness energy to be redistributed into the next series lives, but in more of a law of conservation of energy sense rather than the idea that your individual “self” carries on. Your body decays to feed and your ashes fertilize the earth, or maybe some even dust mites on a mantle, if that’s where you wind up (hey, dust mites need nourishment, too).

A person lives on through the pearls of wisdom they scatter throughout their lives and the experiences of their being that left small imprints on those they knew. These lessons and memories are passed onto future generations through parentage, mentorship, and friendship and we all live eternal from the impressions we left. Humans are vessels for data points, distributing and receiving.

Reflection

When someone passes, I am drawn, as are most, to reflect on the points in which our threads crossed. Flipping through little snapshots or story board frames in my mind. Cue waking up to her and my roommate standing in my doorway playing dubstep and making it rain singles on my bed, the way they decided to pay his rent. Cue very hazy memories of some ridiculous face mask-to-steamroller-to-water pipe contraption she and the other people living in my apartment built.

Death has been a pretty prevalent theme this year.

I lost my cat earlier this year. Cue him sitting in the food bowl when I first picked him up as a kitten. Cue coming in with dirt on his face after playing with his tom cat friend outside. Cue that time he laid barrel-mode on my back. Cue him standing up for treats, as trained my partner. Cue the overlap of him being a kitten, being held by the girl who just passed just outside the kitchen in my old apartment.

I lost another childhood friend earlier this year. Cue the first time I was asked to dance (mostly out of sympathy because we were good friends in 6th grade). Cue getting in big trouble with a group of friends over a MadLibs book. Cue so many science classes, almost in tears, laughing at his goofy antics. Cue computer club meetings and early LAN party shenanigans.

My mom put down one of our childhood cats last month. Cue him sitting like a big fat pear on the top of an open door. Cue my dad sitting with him on his lap giving him heavy pats, squeezing his little head, and jokingly threatening him the way dads do. Cue his bare little belly that he licked too much.

I don’t understand the why certain connections adhere to our consciousness more than others, but I know they are there. These significant crossovers in the individual threads of life that leave a little imprint that will be associated with that person in your consciousness until the end of your own.

I’ve noticed it happening in other people’s lives, as well. And it’s not just deaths of people and pets, but deaths of relationships. Maybe it’s all just part of getting older, but it seems to be increasing in frequency. So many deaths have been overdose or suicide related. Like an unspoken plague on a generation.

Each death is a reminder.

Every time we encounter death we are reminded of our own mortality. The times we probably should have died, but didn’t. The paths we didn’t take that got us to where we are now, as opposed to where we could have ended up. Not only the impressions they left on us, but whether we could have made more of an impression to somehow prevent this. How short life really can be and how we need to try to make the most of every moment and interaction we have.

What memories and wisdom am I leaving behind? Hopefully, more than an anonymous blog, a stash of angry draft emails never sent, a treasure trove of half-baked articles and thoughts on my Google Drive, and a wealth of random pieces of artwork, sketches, and unfinished illustration series.

It’s a good incentive to keep on living, continue creating, and keep trying to make positive impressions on those around me. A good reminder for when I am feeling at my worst.

For some sage wisdom, I’ll leave you with my mum’s hippie af senior yearbook quote, which she’s recited to me and my sister throughout our lives. It just popped up in my memory, writing about the impressions we leave in the interconnected fabric of consciousness.

“My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue, an everlasting vision of the ever-changing view.”

— Carole King, Tapestry

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