la vita è bella

Sidebar: For a while now I've been using song and album names as titles for my posts. Today I found myself at a fork - to use life is beautiful which as actually a song by Vega 4, or its Italian counterpart la vita è bella, which is the name of a movie. As you probably already know, the movie won out. Italian sounds so exotic....

A friend of mine's grandmother was killed recently. The worst possible way - she was first stabbed, then when she failed to bleed to death she was strangled. Here's the kicker - by her son, now the friend's uncle. And what's worse, this friend's mum got to the scene before the grandmother died, so she saw it all. The trauma is real in their house. Real!! It surprises me at times, how fleeting life can get. One moment you're here, the next you're not. I find it a little ironic, that life is God's most precious gift, bar none, and yet of all of them, it's the one gift we're sure is going to be taken back someday.Regardless of religion, creed, belief, culture, upbringing, we all converge on this one point - we're gonna die someday. The English even coined a phrase around it: as sure as death and taxes (turns out the government is pretty efficient when it comes to collecting those...:). But the sad part, is that for those who remain life has to go on. The hardest part of saying goodbye is having to do it all over again, every day for the rest of one's life. Having to face the same truth each new day, that life will never be the same again. Our time here is short. It feels like a part of us has been ripped off. And I guess it usually has. I've so far had the good fortune of never having lost someone close to me. I can't even begin to imagine what it feels like. It's been 4000 years and we as a civilization still haven't grasped the mystery that is death. The closest we've come is to call it the Grim Reaper.

That said, it's not so hard to tell how bad death is from the effects it has on the people it surrounds. No matter how bad someone was alive, there will always be nice things to say about them at their funerals. It's a twisted stroke of fate, that people should find the heart to share all these great things about someone when he's no longer around to hear them. They say the one thing worse than having loved and lost is to never have loved at all. But I would like to contend, the worst thing that could happen to someone, is to die before their time. Before they get the chance to realize all their dreams. Before they get to show the world just what it is they're made of. Life owes it to us to last until such time as our potential is fulfilled. Preachers preach and a lot of them call the grave yard the richest place in the world. They say it's coz it's full of people who died with dreams untold. People who didn't live long enough to see their ambitions through. That, I think, is the worst thing that could happen to someone.

And as terrible as death is, life is that much better. It's under the cover of life that we can, well, live. And love. Learn guitar. And play the music in our hearts. Travel. Meet new people. Climb the Everest (or maybe just the Nandi Hills, but still). Win an Olympic medal. Get an autograph from Snow Patrol. Exercise. Eat fast food. Listen to indie rock and rebel against the law. Fantasize about Jessica Alba. Run a blog. Fly. Freaking anything we wanna do!! And then turn right around and do it all over again. Ever wondered what it would be like if you weren't there? If you were suddenly gone, how would your world react? Well, whatever you thought you were wrong. There can be nothing glamarous about death. Grief is like the ocean. It's deep, it's dark and it's bigger than all of us.

So, does life really end at death? For most of us, yes. But Mary Elizabeth Frye wrote the euology of eulogies, and I'd like to to be mine:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn's rain.

When you wake in the morning hush
I am the sweet uplifting rush.
Of quiet birds in circling flight
I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there, I did not die.

END