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My proximity to grief has always followed me. I spent summers sleeping in hospitals. The cots were nothing compared to the comfort of my grandma’s pallets. The cold floors and fluorescent lights stand out in my memory against the sunny mornings in the garden and our afternoon tea parties. I spent winters visiting hospice centers. The equipment to pass at home is expensive and often no one had the time. Time to care for her deteriorating state. So, my cousins and I would go to the nearby park to skip rocks in a pond while our aunt died. I was old enough to understand her body was beginning to decay but not quite dexterous enough at that age to get a rock to glide across the surface. Every weekend I traveled somewhere new. Who needs family reunions when another death reunites you. I have known loss for as long as I have memories.
It is something that feels intrinsic to me. Though I don’t know if I necessarily believe – that it is part of me. That death is brought by my presence. That I am an omen of damage. I do know however that wherever I go it seems to follow. I spent middle school watching everyone around me attempt to bury themselves. While I was denied the luxury. The luxury of release so instead I carried their pain, loss and grief. I spent my teens mourning. The deaths and obituaries finally caught up to me and I felt as though I was drowning in the memories of every person that left me. Once I hit twenty, nothing changed except I began to accompany my family to pick their burial plots. My grandfather died on my first day of university, and a week later as we laid him to rest my grandmother showed me where she too would be buried. It just so happens days after that the lump in her breast turned out to be cancerous. I now keep my parents will in the dresser beside me because I have learned that death is always a possibility.
I know death – it is recognizable in every form. I am grieving and I am watching grief. I am the first to identify her pain as she bleeds. I am the first to look at him and really see the anger lying beneath. I spent a year racing home after my night shift because I didn’t know if I would come home to him drowning in a pool of his vomit. In that same breath I dreaded my entrance in case he was conscious. I feel death before it reaches me. I anticipate loss in every new thing. I feel as though every unassigned soul falls to me. I feel lost, hopeless and helpless like I am grieving something integral to me. My life, my goals, my dreams. All dead. All buried.
I don’t know if I want it anymore. The science, the improving life. The running from the inevitable. I think treating death like something to avoid, something inherently less – is flawed. I have never run from it personally, but now I see. It is a fate we all avoid. A tragedy we refuse to face. It garners hate because it births pain, and we would rather allow that to fester. Than deal with loss and change.
But death is merely life. It is a cycle forever bound together. Life is born of loss. Why would I commit myself to preventing what should naturally be? Death has no malice, no intention. It does not follow me. It simply is, has been, and always will be the natural order of things.