Too Soon.

Death what a bitch.

Its not deaths fault of course it’s the nature of her business.  She swoops in and steals our breath and doesn’t look back.  Many of us will not get to die peacefully in our sleep, at some ripe old age where people say “Im not surprised, she was getting up there.  At least she lived such a long and full life”

No, many of us are stolen away when we are at our most vulnerable.  Death takes advantage of that and steals us when we are weak, when we do not believe ourselves strong enough to go on.  Our bodies are failing us, our minds are shadowy.  We are no longer who we once were.  We are now just another name on a list and death comes and takes us away.

It is not those of us who die who suffer however, it is those of us death leaves behind.  For those who are gone the suffering is over.  It remains painful for those of us left crying in the emptiness and wondering what happened.  Where did we go wrong?  What could we have done differently?  Is it our fault?

And truthfully sometimes maybe it is.  I mean not in the grand scheme of things.  There are always outside forces bigger than ourselves.  Shit sometimes it cancer, sometimes a plane crashes, sometimes we just didn’t look before stepping off the sidewalk.  But there are those instances when we wonder maybe if I just picked up the phone that day instead of letting it go to the machine…

Would the course of their history have changed?  Would mine?  Had I have just gone to visit instead of making an excuse about how busy I was maybe I could have helped. Maybe my absence was part of a pattern I didn’t know existed.  What if my silence was the final silence before they made their choice to call death themselves and schedule an appointment?

We can’t blame ourselves for the behaviour of those around us, can we?  I mean if we are all products of our environments than in a sense we are all responsible for those around us to some extent.  Ultimately we are all going to make our own decisions and do what we think is best for us, but what if we never had anyone to tell us how much we were loved, how much we were needed, how much our life meant to another?  Maybe we did and just didn’t hear it.

Maybe I should have tried harder to get you into rehab.  Maybe I should have tried harder to make sure you saw the blue sky through the rain.  Maybe it could be different now.  Maybe I am just so racked with guilt about the last words we spoke that I feel responsible for something over which I had no control. 

In the end I have no answers only questions and an ache that I cannot medicate, though I have tried.

Yours Cruelly,

Melissa

(spoken in stardust)