kenjisan

Life and Death

Last week, one of my co-workers passed away. She would have been 67 years old yesterday. While we mourned at her passing and reminisced funny stories that usually revolved around her grumpy approach to IT, we got ready to throw a baby shower for another one of my co-workers. Birth and death, celebrated and observed one day apart.

I wanted to write something on my thoughts last week, but everything I seemed to come up with had been said before—sometimes by me, sometimes by others far more elegant. So I’ll toss all the “living in the moment” BS to the side and say this: I’m intensely afraid of babies and dying. Babies, because of the responsibility that child-rearing requires and the amount of faith that the world is placing on the parent to nurture another life into a healthy adult. Death, because of the vast unknown that comes at the end of our life, and that scary little voice that suggests maybe it is truly an End.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about both of these things recently, particularly since my life is in transition right now and these two events mark two of the biggest transitions you can experience. At one point in my life, I didn’t think kids were for me. Everyone told me that I’d “grow into” the idea, and while I’m not ready to have them just yet, the question is really when, not if. Does the same thing happen with the idea of death? As I grow older, will I “grow into” the idea of passing away? Movies always talk about people ready to die. Will that be me?