All of us together, All of us alone.

Sometimes it feels like we're all just aimlessly shooting around life wounding one another. Like we're playing razor blade bumper cars with one another's feelings. The unfortunate thing is that for those that are unable to avoid the collisions, they become more erratic and inadvertently end up driving even more recklessly, perpetuating the problem even worse within those in their immediate paths of traffic.

Most people want very little more than to be understood and appreciated by someone. A genuine validation of their purpose and existence. What I find to be tragic about the seeming failure of such a simple human requisition is that it's as if we've reached a stalemate with each other because either no one believes that anyone is interested in the veritable contents of their true being, and/or, as a result, are emotionally repressed when they encounter someone who actually is interested. Which, of course, leaves the interested party feeling shut out or potentially rejected. Wounds are mutually inflicted, and both continue on feeling misunderstood.

To be open is to be brave. To be brave is to risk being hurt. But if we're able to choose between shooting a  gun at the virtuous and altruistic, or taking the bullet for them, I think the latter choice is the only way to ever define yourself as part of the former group. This means that we need to be brave. We need to be open. And we need to receive others, despite their considerable differences from ourselves. If we can all be decent and proper in our intentions, then we might just finally find a universal language that the human heart can understand.

Maybe.

The Great Death Game

I was 5 years old when my father came in the room, knelt down on the floor and with tears in his eyes told me and my siblings that his father had died. This was my first experience with death. I remember feeling confused about my father's sadness, and about what my grandfather's death actually meant. I was told that I was too young to attend the funeral, but my two older siblings were going to go. I don't think I ever mourned his death. I was too young to comprehend it all. I just learned to get used to his absence. 

It would be 7 years later when death made another appearance. It was a strange year in which 2 kids from my school whom I knew both died. The first died in his sleep at a young age of 13, and the second was killed in an alleged accidental gunshot wound at 14. At this time in my life, I could comprehend death a bit more, and I recall spending a lot of time in thought about the loss of futures ahead, and about the family of the deceased. I imagined what it must have been like for a mother to come in and try and wake her 13 year old son only to discover he was dead. I pondered over the mystery of the gunshot wound death.

3 years after that, death returned again once more. In a bizarre chain of events, my cousin and my father's then girlfriend were in a high speed head-on collision with one another on an old country highway. My cousin would survive, but my father's girlfriend died. In even stranger circumstance, this happened on my brother's birthday. The odds of a person being involved in a head-on collision in traffic are one thing, but the odds of being in a head-on collision with someone else that you actually know? It was so peculiar. My brother's birthday would forever be somewhat tainted with the sadness of the events of that day. While my father would surely want to celebrate the birth of his oldest son, his heart would always be marked with the loss of a woman he loved.

2 years later, I would be awakened by my mother telling me that I had an important phone call from back east. I took the call and it was my best friend telling me that one of our great friends whom we had known all our lives had taken his own life in the night. He shot himself in the head. He had just graduated high school and had enrolled in college courses. I remember wondering why he even suffered through high school if he was just going to kill himself a couple of months after graduating. I always took a lot of photos (still do), and after his death I remember looking at the photos. I also used to use a video camera and film my friends when were hanging out. I reviewed the photos and the films, and suddenly it seemed so clear to me. It was as if it was so obvious our friend was not happy.

2 years after that came the overdoses. These deaths would continue for years and years to come, and were many. There was something about death that had perplexed me. I could not distance myself from it, it seemed.

I then lost both of my grandmothers and an aunt. Then my sister lost a man she once loved, who was also a friend of mine.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that I wanted to become a mortician. I felt that I had a lot of experience with death, and I wanted to be able to help people during the most devastating time of their lives. I wanted to be able to try and quell some of their anxieties and suffering. Eventually, the human funeral, corpses, and grieving families became a part of my Monday through Friday routine. Though it could be incredibly stressful, I felt good inside knowing that I was doing something for others that few actually could.

Then I moved to Sweden. Death and I once parted from each other again. Until this year.

I lost a beautiful friend in May. Sara. She was 40 years old.

Then Yancey died. He left behind 2 children as well as my 2 nephews.

And today, I was told someone very special in my life died. David. He was under 30.

Treasure those dear to you. Love them with all your might.

Death has made its move once more in a great game that I no longer wish to play.