Today also marks the one year anniversary of cancer taking my father's life.
New Year's Eve has always been an emotional time for me and over the years it seems to have accumulated more and more emotional weight. The parties I remember my parents throwing during my childhood (some of the earliest memories I still have), the concerts we put on at the Albion town hall when I was a teen, Y2K when I was a young professional and so much more.
As time goes on it's easy to see how at one time, each new year felt like it brought with it life and hope and now, north of fifty, it seems like more of the opposite.
But over the course of the last year I've thought a lot about death, more than I have since I was a teenager and I've realized that we have a very strange relationship with this, the only guarantee in life.
We fear death, but it is certain. Without death, the value of life is dubious. Why do we have such an aversion to something that is so essential?
We spend much of our lives avoiding death, worrying about death and grieving death. I understand missing the people we have lost (believe me I've had my share) but I think we go a lot further than that, and over the last year I've grown to believe that this is unhealthy. Like most things in modern life, I think this bad relationship has been heavily capitalized which has only strengthened and amplified it.
I'm not exactly sure what a healthier relationship with death looks like or how to achieve it, but I plan to dedicate more time in the new year to figuring that out. If we can liberate ourselves from this bad relationship I think we will have more capacity to live while we still have life and gain more of what matters as we encounter and experience death.
- jjg