Requiems

All that lives dies. All around that which dies continues to live on. It feeds off of what is left behind and flourishes in the place where the dead suffered until its end. The human psyche is no different.

When someone passes those who survive them search for lessons from their life. We want meaning and seek to find it in the intangibles they left behind. Artifacts are only reminders of what we now see as so important, yet took for granted, belittled, or even outright dismissed before death punctuated their significance.

Death. Those with soft minds and tongues honeyed by old rhetoric tell us it is what gives life meaning. It is easily believed, if resented, in times of mourning. The truth is more difficult to accept at any time. Meaning is given by those who are still alive. It is the ones standing next to us we depend on for meaning, not those who lie below.

We can learn a lesson now, before death. The fear that the lives of those already gone will be somehow less meaningful is meaningless. We face a thousand pains we’ve faced before. No amount of death or lessons learned in suffering make that easier. Death has come and will come again.

Life is here now.