death / Scared of losing folks

[blake 3:17]

I've had a lot of death in my life, at least from First World standards, and got kind of toughened up about losing folks I love.

I'm worried about a couple of people right now and realized how much I was feeling it. I guess sometimes it's been so out of the blue -- hit and runs , stupid shit -- or very expected and in kinda proper time.

Maybe it's getting older and thinking that folks younger than me don't have too long. I dunno. Been a long time since I was scared of it, or scared of being close to people that I was going to lose.

Was gonna say it had been so long since I'd lost someone I loved -- 15 months isn't actually that long is it? Fuck.

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

I've also lost of people in my life, sadly most of them have been my age, sometimes younger or older by a couple years but more younger people than older people of the senior citizen persuasion. It's really very tragic and reminds me daily, I could be next. People are here and then there gone. The world just swallows them up whole and we the cursed living are left with ghosts, memories and feelings.

I just don't know, I don't know if it's a coping mechanism of mine or what but I've always thought that, we can only enjoy the company and love of people for a short instance, like we do a high from a drug or ride on a roller coaster or a good library book, you know? I also believe firmly in what Buddha said, the past is a memory, the future is an illusion, only here and now can we truly love. Which makes perfect sense to me.

All we have is right now, that's it, anything else is just illusions or memories, so we must be inclined to love the living shit out of everyone and thing while we can because well, sometimes that's all your going to be left with, I don't have anything from the people I've loved the most, no pictures or mementos, just memories, memories of pleasantness and overwhelming love (surely romanticized and sensationalized by brain but who cares?). When I think of them, I feel like I can feel all those powerful chemicals swarming through my body like hornets, as if that feeling of love just rushes over me in comforting yet discomforting waves of love via memories. As Poe said, life is but a dream within a dream.

I think that's why my life has been marked with sucking every last bit of love and happiness out of everything and everyone of import. It's all we can do really. Sure, we can one day stop aging, cure death, cure diseases and ailments and all that but we live in unfortunate times, presently, I'm afraid. The thought of death petrifies me, more so than anything I can think of, the whole process absolutely is horrific to me, in any scenario but in a weird way also, it seems freeing. I would be free from poverty, from survival, from violence, douchebaggery, thievery, and so on and I like to think that my loved ones whom have passed on are finally free of the bullshit that is our horrid lives and that there in a better place surrounded and consumed by some incomprehensible love of God. It may be silly or backward of me but I don't give a fuck, it brings me peace.

This could be totally irrelevant to your OP Blake and if so, I'm sorry, just my two cents.

[blake 3:17]

Much appreciated. It's kind of the only way, right?

I'm just feeling some guilt for not being more sympathetic to someone I loved who lost people in a short time -- I was kind of Shit Happens, and didn't like my reaction, but you do what gotta do.

A comrade died 10 years back & I broke plans with him because I didn't want to be mad at him -- he was notorious for not showing up, he had bad depression and was always not showing-- but then he did just die of AIDS related cancers. Damn.

I don't want a heart of stone, and don't want to be a sad mess over everyone who goes.

I had some amazing times with my dad when he was dying. It was great -- he opened up and we got real close in a way we never had.

Just missing a few folks that I'd just love to have an hour with to just hang out and talk or not talk. But that's not happening.

I got close to a couple of kids that are dying over the past year, they're OK right now, but they'll be lucky to make 13.

And I might be a little scared of treating people like a drug trip or library book, but that might be a healthy attitude. Not that I'm gonna smoke them or put them in a Returns box. :unsure:

One foot in front of the other... Try not to guess too much.

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

I'm just feeling some guilt for not being more sympathetic to someone I loved who lost people in a short time -- I was kind of Shit Happens, and didn't like my reaction, but you do what gotta do.

It's tough I think, as somewhat of an outsider in a situation because even if we are intimately familiar and acquainted with the grieving we truly never really know what precisely it is the are looking for but often times, it could be non-verbal things. Some of the most comforting things to me could be construed as "shit happens," responses from those around me or a simple hand on the shoulder or hug and so on.


A comrade died 10 years back & I broke plans with him because I didn't want to be mad at him -- he was notorious for not showing up, he had bad depression and was always not showing-- but then he did just die of AIDS related cancers. Damn.

I don't want a heart of stone, and don't want to be a sad mess over everyone who goes.

I think what we lack in our modern age, in particular in the West, is properly mourning the departed and our views of death. The whole funeral business is just that, a business, which has fucked our entire way of seeing death, dying and grieving. It's just some quick process and I don't think everyone can cope like that. I don't know, I can't think of how to do it differently, I'll admit but I do think, death, as sad and painful as it is, should be as beautiful as the life that just left our loved ones and as life should be and truly is, you know?

I also think, we should view the memory of the deceased in totality.


I had some amazing times with my dad when he was dying. It was great -- he opened up and we got real close in a way we never had.

That's awesome, and I truly mean that.


I got close to a couple of kids that are dying over the past year, they're OK right now, but they'll be lucky to make 13.

You never know though, most people didn't think I would make it past 10 days old and here I am. Or my brother, he's still ticking and that's a miracle in itself to me.


And I might be a little scared of treating people like a drug trip or library book, but that might be a healthy attitude. Not that I'm gonna smoke them or put them in a Returns box. :unsure:

I think a better way of explaining what I mean would be like, people are like a bottle of wine or soda pop, awesome when you first open it, amazing while it's there but then once it's gone, it's gone. Kind of the same thing with people, really, if you think about it.


One foot in front of the other... Try not to guess too much.

I follow the Dory motto of "just keep swimming."

[blake 3:17]

Thanks again. Glad you made it past 10 days!

I should try to get some sleep & not worry about anything much. I've sometimes panicked about really trivial stuff when death or other heavy stuff was up front, I might be worried about some more trivial things at the moment... I don't know. I've got a monkey mind, which can be quite entertaining, creative and interesting, and can be foolish, exhausting and annoying.

Peace up. Take care.

[bcbm]

i have lost too many people i know or that are close to people i know in the last years. this last year has been especially bad. my dads best friend's kid just shot himself a week ago. my dad said the call about that was 'the worst call i have ever had.' getting older i feel i have seen a lot of death in unexpected ways.

it sucks. i hate it. the suicides make me feel even worse about modern life. why should these beautiful people have to go? no reason. its sad. it sucks.

i hate it.

i have seen too much recently. which doesn't come close to the horror so many feel. but it all makes me sad. please don't die people. life is shit, but the alternative is worse.

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

I guess I'm lucky that I've never had anyone I care about die young on me :( I've been to plenty of funerals over the years, but they've all been for elderly relatives. Youngest person I've been to the funeral of was my grandad Jack, and he was 75. I'm really not looking forward to outliving people my own age - it was bad enough losing people two or three generations older than me, I can't imagine what it's like losing a friend or a sibling. You've all got my condolences. It sucks that an individual only dies once, but you can watch loved ones die all the time :/

[human strike]

There is a good chapter in bell hooks' book All About Love: New Visions which offers interesting perspectives on how to deal with the death of loved ones - I recommend it.

In my 22 years of life, death has been very absent. The thought that my grandparents should die soon - or even my pets - deeply worries me because I have never learned how to deal with death. :/

[blake 3:17]

It's weird stuff. I guess there's been some ghosts around lately. I was talking with a friend, and I'd found a while we both loved this very obscure little anarchist noise band from the West Coast. I'd been a given a cassette of theirs by a traveller in the 90s and that's all I knew of them til about a year ago, and we were talking last week about them, and then he tells that the singer was his girlfriend when she killed herself.



Other weird stuff popping up -- photos, band posters, references...

My first crush -- we used to clean the blackboards after school together -- was killed in a hit and run. I was 10.

I realized I just keep going on & on... A couple of weird ones, finding out it was a suicide quite a bit later. Just weird.

[blake 3:17]

Other thing is my friend is in an Egyptian jail and just now got news is on hunger strike.

[blake 3:17]

A friend suicided this week, early 40s.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I've lost a few family members over the course of my life. It's never really hit me super hard, though. Two of my grandparents died before I was born. My grandmother on my dad's side died from alcoholism, IIRC. My grandfather on my mom's side died from an extremely aggressive form of cancer that spread from his gastrointestinal tract all the way up to his brain...he died when she was 14, she was kicked out of her home by my grandmother when she was 15, it left a deep scar on her entire life & his life/death was one of the things she talked about most from her past when I was a child. She loved him probably more than anyone else in her life and from what she and others have told me about him, I'm sorry I never got the chance to know him.

My grandfather on my dad's side died peacefully at his home in his mid 70s when I was about 13. He died watching a football game, he just fell asleep in his armchair and never woke up. He led a good life and his death wasn't very tragic in my opinion, that's how I'd like to die, in my own home and still active, not in a nursing home or any shit like that. My grandmother on my mother's side had kind of a slow, lingering death, it wasn't good but her death was probably ultimately a good thing, no more pain, no more suffering. Her last words according to my mother who was there as she slipped away was "it's so beautiful"

Oddly enough one of the people who's deaths affected me the most was someone who I didn't even know that well. There was this one girl in my high school art class who sat near me. She was gorgeous, one of the best looking girls in my school by far, and she was also a very kind person who wasn't conceited at all. Everybody liked her, she radiated life and I felt that she'd do well in whatever she chose to do with her life. Later I learned that she died in a car crash, she was 20 years old. Whenever I think about the fact that she's no longer around on this earth I get a really strange and unpleasant feeling, it just sucks that she died so young. Another kid I knew a little bit shot himself in the head when he was 19, I didn't know him that well.

I don't know, life and death is complicated. Death means no more pain but it also means no more pleasure, I remember the revleft user "nothing human is alien" saying that and that's whats kept me going whenever I get into bad stuff, which seems to be more frequent lately. :unsure: I like pleasure and I want to continue experience it, but man, life is so painful sometimes

[blake 3:17]

Oddly enough one of the people who's deaths affected me the most was someone who I didn't even know that well.

That makes sense to me. I've often just felt really weird about deaths of people I'm not that close to. A friend was annoyed about upset I was by the death of somebody I didn't really know and my answer was But they could have been a good friend! It was someone I wanted as a friend.

& it can be weird trying to figure out about going to the funeral or contacting the family for folks you don't know so well.

All I've figured out is go to the funeral, memorial or wake if I can.

[human strike]

My separation anxiety being super bad at the moment has been making me worry about random stuff like what if my mum died - she's not dying, she's not even especially unwell or anything. If I'm left alone with my own thoughts for five minutes I'm getting the worst anxiety. :(

[Yuppie Grinder]

i lost a friend a few months ago
she had been a heroin addict, but had been clean for two weeks
her heart gave out in her sleep
i had stopped hanging out with for a few months because she had moved to the other side of town
we were gonna chill and smoke that week that she died and i forgot all about it
we had been close friends when we were 13
when junkies would exploit her and everyone would talk shit i'd stick up for her
miss her