Death, Life, and Rebirth

Last week, my best friend told me that he'd received a text message that a friend he'd known from back home had just died.  A few days later (it might have even been the following day), while having dinner with him in a restaurant, he came back from the bathroom to find me staring at the same kind of message on my own cell phone--someone I knew from high school had just died.  They say that death comes in threes, and this time was not an exception.  The day after that, my mom told me that a friend and neighbor of my grandparents had just died.  Three deaths in as many days, none of them directly affecting me, all of them touching the lives of people that I knew and loved.

My mom told me that my grandparents were trying to help the surviving spouse of their neighbor with some of the necessary arrangements.  It prompted my mom to urge my grandmother to seriously think about the kinds of things that she would want and make sure that she made it known to us.  It prompted me to ask the same question of my mother, because as we all know, and as I had been reminded of that week, death can come for any of us at any time.  It even had me thinking about what I would want for myself.

That same night, my mom and I ended up watching Tuck Everlasting, which is about a family that can never die.  It's a movie that came out nine years ago, based on a book that came out over thirty years ago, but I had never read it or seen the movie.  My mom loves this movie for some reason, and while I was not overly impressed with it, there was a quote that stuck with me:  "If there's one thing I've learned about people, it's that many will do anything, anything not to die. And they'll do anything to keep from living their life. Don't be afraid of death, Winnie. Be afraid of the unlived life."

Now, I have never really feared death.  I find it mysterious because I don't know what I believe about what happens afterwards, but I don't really fear it.  I fear pain.  Life may be a gift, but it's also difficult, and I certainly don't want to go through it tragically disfigured or paralyzed from the neck down.  Maybe that's not the popular response, but it's how I feel, and I think a lot of people feel the same.  And I fear loss, because it is its own kind of pain, and sometimes, a more terrible kind.  I fear the heart-wrenching pain of losing my brother, a parent, or a best friend, and the seemingly insurmountable task of waking up the next day and moving on without them.

Sometimes I do wonder about my own death, but more about how I will be remembered.  Another unpopular thing to do, because it is a mark of vanity, I suppose, but still something I believe is relatively common.  I wonder if people that never really cared anything about me would say that they were sad that I died.  I wonder if people who never really knew me would leave trite comments on my facebook wall about how sorry they were that we didn't know each other better.  I wonder if my funeral would be attended by people that had no business being there.

I wonder about these things every once in a while, but the only thing I really fear about my own death follows with the quote from the movie:  I fear that I will die before I have lived.  I look at the life I have now, and while there is so much for which I am grateful, I don't feel like an active participant in it.  I feel like I am rolling along while it is happening to me.  I know that the only person who can change that is me, but as with so many things, it is much easier said than done.

Today is Easter Sunday.  Regardless of your religious beliefs, and despite the fact that it falls uncharacteristically late this year...AND the fact that we live in South Florida, Easter still symbolizes the beginning of spring.  So today I am thinking about renewal and rebirth.  Today I am thinking about ways to jump start my life.  To stop letting it happen to me and to start just living it.  I am thinking about ways that I can find myself telling Kate Norris on January 1st of 2012 that 2011 was, in fact, "the year."