---The Cost of Loving People Who Die
It's strange how, the older I get, the more weight death seems to carry. I had many bouts of severe depression and times where I wanted to end it all, but it feels like there’s a threshold you cross, where you want to keep living. Not even necessarily for yourself, but for the people you love.
As a kid, or even a young adult, death was simple. People were born, and people died. There wasn’t much emotion tied to it. It felt as natural as the sun coming up every morning.
Now, death feels less and less natural. It feels like a disgusting curse we somehow never learned to remove. It’s something we’ve all accepted as a part of life, but it feels foreign to me. It feels like I’m reading a grim fantasy book, where some perverse force is making people stop existing. Forever silencing them. Freezing them into a single moment in time, while the rest of us are forced to leave them behind.
That doesn’t feel real to me.
What drags at my mind isn’t just that I will die. It’s that I will have to live without the people I love. I will have to watch them die. Because truly loving someone means watching them slowly wither away until they die. Such a vile thought that is. Yet, somehow, it's what we all dream of. Growing old together, knowing that this is the only conclusion to the story.
If life goes the way it’s “supposed” to, you will watch everyone you love die. And in turn, they will watch you die. That is love. And I can’t feel anything but hate toward the thought of watching the people I love suffer, or disappear from my world forever.
When I think about where these thoughts come from, it comes down to having more to lose as I’ve gotten older. It also makes death more real when the village of people who raised you starts to become frail, and you start crossing the markers in time where they took their final steps.
That thought gets to me. And I think it’s the one that will haunt me most when I come face to face with the inevitability of all of this---the moment where you can no longer look forward to time with the people you love. You can only look backward.
Memories start to change. Warp. Like a picture taped to a tree outside. Over time, the picture fades. The colors smear. And eventually, you’re left with memories of memories, trying to see someone who is no longer there. Never another chance to refresh the image. Never another chance to make something new with them.
It’s cold.
It’s wrong.
It’s cruel.
So to you, death--I loathe you. I detest you. And yet, like an abused child with nowhere else to go, I am forced to accept a world where you exist: left only to hope, that I too can be there to watch my loved ones die.
---untitled_operator