People move, relationships end, death happens.  Life doesn’t stop and entropy marches blindly onward.

TIME! Is marching on.
And time.. is still marching on.
This day will soon be at an end and now it’s even sooner.
And now it’s even sooner.
And now it’s even sooner.

They Might Be Giants, Older

As we all do, I have seen many of my relationships (family, friends, lovers) end.  When I was growing up, I moved every year or two.  These moves were always dramatic, to different cities and different states.  Rarely was it across town, but even when it was, it was to different schools with different friends.  I got really good at making new friends, but I also got really good at spending time with myself.  I also got really good at letting go.

My father died when I was 25. A good friend of mine died when he was 27–we were the same age.  All of my grand parents and great grand parents are gone, most of them within memory.  (My mom is alive and well–and, since I know you are reading this, you better stay that way!)  Death is not a stranger and in some ways that is comforting.  When I was in high school, I went through the stereotypical depressed years.  I, in fact, almost died in my sophomore year of high school when I had a misdiagnosed case of appendicitis.  I went for a week and a half with a ruptured appendix.  For those of you not paying attention, the typical life expectancy is something like 48 hours.

I went through a very weird period where I personified Death (yeah, capital “D” Death personified-booooy!).  I imagined Death as anthropomorphic figure who rationed, reasoned, and maybe even felt. I imagined what it would be like to die and converse with this person.  You might understand why the first Terry Pratchett books I fell in love with involved Death as a character–and if you don’t, then you simply haven’t read enough Terry Pratchett and I insist you stop reading my drivel this moment and go pick up one of his books.  Ahem, anyways…

When I moved to California, I felt very lost.  Even though I hated Texas, where we had lived before, I had really started to feel at home there.  I was in advanced classes, I had some good friends, I even had girls flirting with me.  I felt like things were starting to come together and I was also working off of the promise my parents made not to move me when once I got to high school.  I can still recall my mother telling me “I had to move my freshman year of high school and I never want to do that to you.”  For reason beyond most mortals control, we did end up moving, and, yes, it was in my freshman year.  I remember on my birthday, one of the girls in my Honors English class gave me a snickers bar wrapped around an old stuffed animal frog for my birthday, shyly, about a month before we were moving.  All I remember is blurting out “I’m moving!” and getting away as fast as I could.

Romantic relationships end.  While I’m open to sharing many things with you, my faceless readers, these are mine.  If you want to hear these stories, I doubt you’ll read them many of them here.  But they do–and those of you who know me, know some of those stories.  Relationships, even ones ending, are important to me.  People are important to me.  I strive to not have messy endings and I think I’ve done a pretty good job.  I’m still friends with many of the people I’ve dated–just because something doesn’t work out doesn’t mean you can’t make something of it after enough time has passed.  Then again, sometimes you can’t and I recognize that too.

This is even more important to me when dealing with romantic relationships within social circles. I don’t tend to date random people–I’ve never been one to pick up on a random woman in the library or coffee shop or whatever.  And I try to be as honest as possible IN my relationships and part of that is working through problems.. and acknowledging when they’re probably unsolvable.  I prefer to break-up mutually and amicably.  This not only allows for, hopefully, no bad feelings, but then there’s not all this awkwardness in the social circles.  You’ve already lost a romantic partner, why lose friends as well?  And there’s a strong likelihood people in your social circle may date people you have, this is part of how social circles work.  If you date someone I have, I won’t begrudge you your shot at happiness, so don’t worry about feeling awkward about me.  I say more power to ya!

Emotions are hard things to wrangle sometimes, so I’m not suggesting that I’ve got good control over those all the time.  But I believe: you do good, you get good; so I try my best to do good, especially in all of my relationships (family, friends, lovers).  And this ties back to the whole death thing.  You never know when someone will leave you.  You never know when you will leave. So why mess around with it?  Get the best out of life.  When it’s worth it, hold on for dear life… and when it’s not, don’t hold on when you don’t need to.

There’s a lot more to life than carrying the past around with you.

As I have grown, I have become more aware of that fact that I do not wish for an eternity of silence, darkness, and my own thought, as I had so deerly pondered and imagined in early days.

I also realize that I find the idea of a personified death reather silly. Still cool, though, very cool. If you ever want to send me Grim Reaper-esque stuff, I’m always taking.

However, death has been a constant topic of mine over the last couple of weeks as another trip into Isaac’s study of religion has intensified. A lot of people, if not all people, fear death. And, I suppose rightly so.

In talking with a newly made good friend of mine, she was inquiring about some of my beliefs as an atheist. And she made the comment unsual, which is one of the reasons I so enjoy talking with her, that she thought atheists would be less likely to commit suicide.

See. I said unsual. I hope this is the case, but from my experiences, it is not. The average person I speak with believes (or professes the belief) that atheists cannot and do not appreciate life, and with a stark future staring ahead of them, suicide is much easier.

Aside from the fact that atheism is not a belief system (and to try to stereotype as such is wrong), I fit firmly with my friend’s perception better. If you think that you are going to die, a death that is permanent and unfulfilling, life means that much more. And trying to leave it is a horrid, horrid thought.

I can proudly say that I do not want to die. I want to live every single day, as happy as I can be. I embrace every facet of the beauty and fruit of reality.. because who knows when I will be without it?

Does the stark idea of my belief in death scare me? Absolutely. Does it make me less of a person, unhappy, or scared to live? No one bit. There are some nights when I think about it, and it makes me sad. Those nights, it would be good to have someone to hold on to, but my lonely bed is as empty as ever.

But, at least I’m alive to know that it is empty.