Death

It seems like we have been losing a lot of people close to us lately and it is pretty tough. The toughest period of losing people for me was a 10 month period around my 20th birthday. My grandmother on my Mom's side died in June, fairly suddenly. She fell at her house, went to the hospital, they found cancer and within a month she was gone. My Dad died the next January, after battling colon cancer for two years with two surgeries (one that left a gapping hole in his stomach because they couldn't close it all the way up due to an infection) and chemo and everything. And my other grandmother died in March. During the same period other people close to me also lost people. My roommate in college lost his father at Thanksgiving, he had been fighting bone marrow cancer and was up and down. At the beginning of fall quarter he had actually been up getting around pretty decent, but by the end of the quarter his state had really deteriorated, which is what can happen with bone marrow cancer. Sophie's grandfather also died, around Christmas due to complications from diabetes which caused some other problems and things in his kidneys, which is what I think he actually died from. And two of my friends from high school lost their grandfather.

They say it takes two years to really get past grieving over someone that you lost, and I think that is due to the emotion you feel during the first anniversary of the passing. You get hit with the same emotions you had when you lost the person the first time only now there are no ceremonies and people don't know why your acting the way you are. When someone first dies there is all kind of outpouring of sympathy from family and friends and it kind of distracts you some what, but on the first anniversary there are only the people who were the closest that are left to deal with things. The second year you kind of expect not to be comforted and the emotions aren't quite as strong. When my dad died it was just me and Mom and every January 17th we would call and talk and just see how each other was. Until this year. 10 years later the day is able to pass without any fanfare or acknowledgement, I mean you never forget that day, but eventually you get far enough away from it that it doesn't have the same impact. Eventually there are enough new days that mean something, weddings, birthdays, graduation days that you don't concentrate on the death days. But only if you keep living yourself. Just because someone else stops living that doesn't mean you can stop.

It is hard at first, I cut back my class schedule to 12 hours for the rest of winter quarter, but I was doing undergrad research in chemistry and the summer before my senior year I got an internship with Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel. That is where I met Bud Smith and he really helped me make sense of what had happened. He talked to me about Job from the bible about how he had always been a good and faithful servant. One day the devil and God were talking and God said look at my servant Job he is very faithful. And the devil was like of course he will be faithful if you keep blessing him, take some of those blessings away and we'll see how faithful he is. So God let the devil take away his things, and his family and even his good health, but Job wouldn't say anything bad about God. Eventually his friends came and told him that he should be cursing God and he held out for a long time until finally he asked God 'Why'. Then God asked him if he had been there when he created the heavens and the Earth and of course the answer was 'no' so God asked him why he would ever question what God did and he didn't have an answer. Job said he was sorry for ever questioning God and he understood that he didn't have the understanding or knowledge of God and he asked for forgiveness. When he prayed to God, God saw he was sincere and he blessed Job with more than what he had before.

I don't know if that is going to make a whole lot of sense, but the basics are that God takes people for reason we don't understand at the time and only when we look back can we see what the plan was. Eventually we will all meet the same end and there are going to be a lot of people taken from our lives. We can't really blame God, because we are all born with a terminal illness called mortality. All you can do is be prepared, and it may seem a little morbid, but I always remember my Dad saying that I eventually he would be gone and now it makes a little more sense I guess. It is always hard to lose someone, but God won't give you more than you can handle. I don't remember exactly what verse it is, but it is there. If you keep that in mind you can make it through anything.