Death

Do you remember when and how you were first introduced to the concept of death? For me I think it was when my paternal grandmother passed away. I one day asked my dad when will we see her again. My dad said when people get very very old, they travel to a nice place far far away, so far that it is hard for their old bodies to come back again. It sounded more like a retirement plan to me. Even as a kid, I knew this was my dad's way of telling a bitter truth. I accepted that story. It worked fine for me at the time. As soon as he said it, I thought to myself okay, she is gone for good. I get it. It is not like I am dumb just because I am a kid. I also thought how selfish they are. They leave and abandon their loved ones behind that easily just to live in a nicer place? Apparently, even my dad was not thinking of such an analysis, of the harsh reality of being abandoned and left in his supposedly nicer version of the story.

Later our family ended up spending many years very far from each other; and we had to work hard on staying in touch, to keep us alive; yet, so many things were lost and died through out the years and thousands of miles. Maybe I had always subconsciously associated the concept of being far away from someone equivalent to being dead to them. Maybe that is why I like to make sure that being far away and alive be different from being far away and dead. Maybe that is a futile effort to begin with, maybe not, not sure yet.

Of course that story stopped working for me when I was in the first grade and a cousin of mine who was in middle school was killed in a car accident. She was not very old to travel far away!