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2:19am May 1, 2014

I feel very, very alive right now.

And horribly sad, for reasons I can’t explain.

Maybe it’s everything catching up with me, all this talk about death.  None of the beauty of the love that is waiting for people in death, means that it’s any easier for those of us who get left behind.

And I’m really scared… I mean my mom stopped breathing recently.  They almost had to do chest compressions.  And she’s got this piling-on list of scary diagnoses, some of which have no answers and never end well.

And my father’s fear of death scares me somehow.  It’s not that he has anything right now that’s as scary as what my mom has, that we know of anyway.  But he’s older than we ever thought he’d be – men in his family tend to die in the 45-65 age range and he’s going to be 73 this year.  And he’s getting more and more afraid of death as time goes on.

And I wish I could take it for him.  I mean, I don’t want to die in his place, because then he’d just grieve me and fear death.  And the last thing I want is to die before my parents, because they’d never be able to stand that, and I know they’ve been very afraid it would happen.  No loving parent wants to outlive their child.   But I wish I almost… show him the way through? I wish I could take that feeling of being in the middle of love, in the middle of home, in the middle of a place that is so perfect for you that it can’t be any more perfect, and give him the tiniest hint of it so he’d know what he’s in for.  And so that shadow of fear around his mind would lift.

It’s strange how alive I feel whenever I think about death.  And I don’t mean that in a morbid way.  It’s some weird reflection of my experiences of the past several years.  Sometimes I don’t know how to relate to people who haven’t seen their own death close enough to recognize it.

Also, everything I’ve said about that place of love, of home, of it being the perfect exact place in the universe where you belong?  That’s not just death, that’s also life, and there are ways to experience that while alive.  I assume the reason they’re attached to death is that death lowers our defenses against that part of reality.  But from what I’ve been told, it’s very possible to cross into that place while alive and come out whole.  Difficult as hell, may even feel like it will result in death, but possible.

Maybe that’s why death makes me feel alive.  Because the thing that’s at the center of life, becomes apparent to many of us when close to death as well. 

I don’t know.  I don’t even know if these things can be understood.  I think they’re outside of what a mind can grasp.

But I know they’re real.  And that’s all I need to know.