Death

It's an optimistic title, really.

No. No it's not. Not in the world we live in where people die every second of every day, most by no fault of their own, and leave families and friends behind with fragmented memories of who they are and what happened when they were alive.

I personally am so attached to people that I cannot even tolerate the idea of there being no afterlife. If you so believe, I am genuinely impressed with your ability to keep on keeping on. I am currently bawling like a two year old who had their Cheerios stolen over The Fault in Our Stars, and I rarely cry about  books. If I knew for a fact that there was no afterlife, and I could not hold on to that hope - that desperate hope fueled by my own lack of knowledge, that drives my love for science because it is NOT KNOWING and searching for answers anyway - I would be in pieces everyday. Or worse, I would be selfish and take my own life, because I just couldn't handle knowing that people I loved were gone forever. Every suicide ever committed would be selfish, and I would be one of those selfish assholes, so I could just cease to exist and not have to tolerate loss.

The only reason I'm not sad when people die is that I do think life continues after. I didn't cry because I was sad my great-grandfather was gone when he left (the only person in my family or in my life that I've admired/known well enough to REALLY care that he was gone), in the same way I don't cry when people move. I can see them again. Time moves much faster than we give it credit for. What made me cry for a few days straight was seeing his lovely wife, who I just visited earlier this month (Who kicked my tail at Yahtzee, in her late nineties. Please, God, let me grow up to be like her.), look at him during the viewing. I obviously can't know what she was thinking, and I don't have the heart to ask, but she just looked like... someone who'd been deserted. Like he'd left her alone. I cry any time anyone else mourns because it's THEIR sadness that makes me upset. Not that the person is temporarily gone. It absolutely breaks my heart to see them in that sort of pain, because I know how I would be in that state - and everyone I've watched handles it so much better than me.

So here I am, thoroughly destroying a box of Puffs, because a fictional sixteen year old girl has to speak at her first love's funeral, with no confidence in any sort of afterlife. No Something with a capital S at the very least, for those of you who've read it. It's also because the boy she's mourning was obsessed with being some sort of globally important person before leaving the globe, the same way I am sometimes. (Who am I kidding, nearly all the time. I just want to save the world. Is that too much to ask?) Which made full realization smack me in my very rosy face: if I really believe in an eternal conception of time, why am I so hurried to reach my full potential? Why do I care so much about my serious imperfection? It's not restricted to 90-some years. I have until *insert humanly inconceivable amount of time here*. There's no rush. I don't need to get so down on myself when I make mistakes, because the wisdom I gain from them are far more valuable than the time they consume. Neither time nor money are goals that can be realistically achieved in this life. They're means to the end, not ends in and of themselves. It's something that people "know" but I don't think they really KNOW. The sort of thing we say but don't truly understand or believe. (Unless there's a select elite that is living a wonderfully chill life most would envy, which I'm sure there is.)

By the way, I finished the book. It's the best kind of book, in that the characters have the same sort of realization right after I do, and everything is right in the world. The sentence is finished.