When we talk about life and death, for life we tend to think about the things that we’re going to do tomorrow or what happened yesterday. We think about our children and our parents, our jobs and the material things that we have gained. We think about our accomplishments and things we wish our children could accomplish.
For the most part, we are often told “life is what you make it”. “You get out of it what you put into it”. We know that for as long as we wake up, there is something to be accomplished, we can choose to do the same task we did yesterday differently today.
Life, however, is not always coming up roses. It is not always a pleasant situation. Life shows up and some of us have to deal with Life on its on terms. We discover that our coworkers are people too, people with pains and heartaches that effect their ability to perform and interact. We discover that just because the job needs to get done, everyone is not of a mind to complete it.
We discover there are so many masks to Life, some of us have masks to be something we are not, and some of us have masks to hide what we truly are. There are masks to hide our feelings, masks to reveal our feelings. Some of us have several different masks that serve several different purposes. Some of us need masks to cope at work, a mask to cope at home, a mask to cope in public, a mask to cope with our children.
Life sometimes encourages us to drink, do drugs, commit adultery, rob, steal, be dishonest, and be honest but ultimate live. Life also encourages us to stop drinking, stop doing drugs, stop committing adultery, stop robbing, stealing, and being dishonest. Sometimes our lives are so good we would never consciously do anything to damage it but.......something happens. We lose focus, stop paying attention and make mistakes.
Because of our mistakes, putting in what we are getting out of Life, lives are destroyed, relationships damaged, jobs lost which results in lost accomplishments. Because of the choices made, we have lost our most valued possessions; our spouses, our children, our savings and everything that we have worked so hard to get. What we can lose ultimately is the most important thing to us and that is our Life. DEATH IS FINAL.
Death can be horrible, death can be tragic, death can be painless and/or painful but sometimes death can be better than life. Some people suffer so until they pray for death, they ask their loved ones to put them out of their misery. Death can wreak such havoc in lives until loved ones wish for the end. Events leading to death can make for bad situations if a matter of adultery is figured in, if there were no life insurance policies, if there were several life insurance policies involved. Large estates really make for terrible situations if the loved ones left cannot agree.
However, none of the above matters for the deceased because everything ceases to exist. The deceased normally doesn’t take loved ones with them, the spouse is left, the children are left, the job is left, the home and everything accomplished by the deceased individual. Of course, there are the individuals who decide to have Wills that designate who gets what; sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s not, sometimes it is accepted, sometimes it is not......
DEATH IS FINAL
Can we learn from Life as we learn from Death? DEATH IS FINAL!
The first death to impact my life was my father. He died in 1971 when I was 10 years old; I was in fifth grade. It was such a shock to me, I really didn’t know him, I just knew he died. Upon his death, we got some financial security. I was a dependent child, therefore, eligible to receive Social Security because my father died. I don’t know what I thought about this man’s death because, to me, he was a father in name only. He didn’t live with us, lived in another state. I never really learned anything from him and so, I always wondered what it would have been like to have this guy around before he died. It struck me as odd that this guy never did anything for me in Life but upon his death, my life took a turn for the best.