the difference
Apr. 29th, 2017 11:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_dylanOne of our students committed suicide (although investigations are still ongoing). I can't believe he's just gone. I'm also (guiltily) relieved it was not one of my students. I don't know that I could actually handle that right now. I don't know that I can actually handle this, but I don't have much choice.
I can't help but think about Mary. I'm so glad she's safe. She and I both thought that if we ever broke up, she'd die. I guess at some point, she stopped thinking that. I knew I'd never break up with her. Even without that fear, I don't think I ever would have. Even when I felt the most pushed away, the most neglected, the most hurt, I believed we'd work through it and be together. I was wrong, but right now, I'm just so grateful she's safe.
I think about how devastated I'd be if something were to happen to her. I think about how my life would have been if something had happened to her while we were together; I would definitely have thought that death stole my lifemate from me. Yet she is no longer my lifemate anyway; she and I do not communicate at all (I can't even imagine it), and it's on purpose. I might never talk to her again and will almost certainly never see her again, sort of the same as if she were dead, yet there is such a difference.
In a world where someone you love can utterly disappear without a trace, why would people ever want to be apart? Yet people do. People break up; people just don't want to be with each other anymore, and that's it. Either way, someone you desperately love is wrenched from your life, yet somehow there's a difference.
When someone loses a partner to death, they're often devastated, yet that same person who would have been devastated, given time with their partner, can also just cast them away and never talk to them again. It doesn't seem to make much sense.
Some day none of us will be here any more, and it seems to be such a blow when one of us leaves, yet while we're here, we love but also fight and break up and divorce and act as if the other person is dead. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to wrap my head around it.
But I can't stop thinking about her and feeling really grateful that she's okay and still here.
And no matter what happens, this student is gone; no matter what we do or what investigations happen, it won't change that he's gone. Life just doesn't make much sense. I don't know how we all are able to just go about our lives in the face of such realities. How can someone I spoke with days ago just be gone? Why him? Why here and now?
I can't help but think about Mary. I'm so glad she's safe. She and I both thought that if we ever broke up, she'd die. I guess at some point, she stopped thinking that. I knew I'd never break up with her. Even without that fear, I don't think I ever would have. Even when I felt the most pushed away, the most neglected, the most hurt, I believed we'd work through it and be together. I was wrong, but right now, I'm just so grateful she's safe.
I think about how devastated I'd be if something were to happen to her. I think about how my life would have been if something had happened to her while we were together; I would definitely have thought that death stole my lifemate from me. Yet she is no longer my lifemate anyway; she and I do not communicate at all (I can't even imagine it), and it's on purpose. I might never talk to her again and will almost certainly never see her again, sort of the same as if she were dead, yet there is such a difference.
In a world where someone you love can utterly disappear without a trace, why would people ever want to be apart? Yet people do. People break up; people just don't want to be with each other anymore, and that's it. Either way, someone you desperately love is wrenched from your life, yet somehow there's a difference.
When someone loses a partner to death, they're often devastated, yet that same person who would have been devastated, given time with their partner, can also just cast them away and never talk to them again. It doesn't seem to make much sense.
Some day none of us will be here any more, and it seems to be such a blow when one of us leaves, yet while we're here, we love but also fight and break up and divorce and act as if the other person is dead. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to wrap my head around it.
But I can't stop thinking about her and feeling really grateful that she's okay and still here.
And no matter what happens, this student is gone; no matter what we do or what investigations happen, it won't change that he's gone. Life just doesn't make much sense. I don't know how we all are able to just go about our lives in the face of such realities. How can someone I spoke with days ago just be gone? Why him? Why here and now?
(no subject)
Date: 2017-05-02 08:27 pm (UTC)I had an LJ friend do that a few years ago. One minute she was making amazing posts on LJ, and putting up hilarious cat pictures on FB, and suddenly there were posts on FB by her mom about her death. Apparently she locked her cats in her bedroom, and looked up how to kill herself with pills online. It was hardly a shock; she'd been in and out of mental institutions for years, but she wrote about her experiences beautifully. She so incredibly witty and talented. It was appalling that not only someone would kill themselves, but someone with as much talent as she had would do it. It really was disorienting.
I think about it as her choice, though. Luckily I didn't know her in person, I guess.
Sometimes I wonder if my cousin killed herself. She overdosed on her pain medication in 2008. Her cats and dogs then ate part of her body in the days it took someone to find it. I hope she didn't kill herself because her death resulted in her dogs being put down, and I know she would have hated that, but if she DID make the choice, then it was her choice.
I think, too, that in some ways my mom killed herself, though it took many years. She chose not to take care of herself, of her health. She died because she refused to go to the doctor for her illnesses, until her remaining leg had to be cut off and she just wasn't strong enough to take it any more. She was only 61. Much of it was her choice, though.
Sometimes death is choice.
I think of love that way, too. I love someone, but that doesn't mean they love me, or they love me the same way. Or they will chose to love me that way forever. Things change. They can chose to go away. And I have to accept that choice.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-05-03 10:25 pm (UTC)This contrasts with what Abraham Maslow said about self-actualized people, that they get over death almost as if it never happened. That is not what we do, although it might look like some bizarre version of that.
I sometimes wonder if all death is a choice. I also sometimes wonder if nothing is ever a choice.
Death and love...
I did not know they did that to dogs (but not cats?) who engage in that behavior. Seems really unfair.