Goodbye, sis, we love you

As I go through life and get older, I am running into a stage that more often than I like begs a question. A question that has plagued religion and philosophers throughout time.

When we lose someone we love, no matter their age, we far too often are sad, bitter and angry. If we believe in God we ask "why?" If we don't believe in God, we ask "why?" The latter because even those who don't believe in God still WANT to believe that there is somewhere or something after this life for their loved ones.

Philosophers ponder the question of life and existence and ask the why do we exist and then perish. What is the sense, they wonder, to a life so short. Religion offers the simplistic response, saying that it was their time or that god just wanted them home. There was a movie or something, I can't recall at the moment, where someone had said of their child's death that God had wanted another angel. And the lead actress asked if God was so all powerful why not just make another angel, why did He have to take the child.

But in our grief and loss and pain, we miss the real fact. We are asking the wrong questions, making the wrong assumptions.

Instead of asking why our loved one had to leave us too soon, we should be asking why we got to spend the time with them we did. We so focus on not having enough time that we fail to enjoy the time we have.

Death is the great equalizer of all arguments, all disagreements, all petty problems.

What importance can we place on a squabble about how someone disapproves of our lifestyle, or how someone got the family bible over someone else or who has the most money or best spouse or nicest kids or whatever? When in the end, death will claim us all. Death will not equivocate on whether we had enough time to get over our small differences. Death will not care that you missed out on getting back together or whether one side or the other apologized first or how long it takes to get over feeling sorry for ourselves.

Death is death and it waits for no one, man or woman. Death comes at a time and place of its choosing, whether we are ready or not.

When it is time for someone to die, then it is time.

While you are griping over that "borrowed" recipe or hurt feelings or imagined wrong or jealous anger or whatever, time is ticking away, moving inexorably to the final end we all must face. Death. The end of existence in this corporeal form. Regardless if you believe in the after life, in whatever form, or you believe that once you're dust you're dust and nothing more, it is the same for those still living. The end. No more.

So I urge you to remember this fact as you swear you will never talk to so and so again because they yelled at your pregnant wife or snubbed your significant other's kids or talked down to you or whatever you feel is deserving of not speaking with them again, even for the time it takes you to get over it or one of you to apologize. Death comes. And we only have so much time with those we love, those we share this world with, those who are just as human as we. And if we only change the questions we will ask at the end, we will change the way we spend our time in the now.

SPend the time you have with those around you, because there is NEVER enough time. And all those lost moments are just that, lost. You can never get them back.

I am not even going to ask if you disagree or not. I am not going to say that it doesn't matter to me because I am just Thinking Out Loud. I am going to simply ask that you think about this. That you look around you and see if there is someone you have lost moments with. And decide to not lose any more.

Have a great day. Goodnight and goodbye, sis, we love you.

Charles