About 9 months ago one of my co-workers passed away, and I have no issue in saying that I still miss her. It is starting to get a little easier though. I realized today that I am no longer in the habit of looking for her car in the parking lot, I haven't had a dream with her in it for a few months, and seeing her name on documents at work no longer makes me want to immediately flip to a new page. However, it is still hard to deal with her passing in other ways. She was by far the closest I have ever been to someone who died. Which of course makes sense. When you work with someone 40 hours a week for almost 2 years there are times that you question who you see more, you co-workers or your family. The topic of death seems more real to me now and as such I have had a harder time dealing with it.
I make no apologies when I say that I am an Agnostic. I would love to find a religion that I felt comfortable with. But every single one that I have looked has a canon that seems a little too contrived too be a historical truth, or is too cultish. I respect that people have a need for religion and find comfort in it, but I have a hard time believing there is one true religion. And if there is one, I don't think we've found it yet. At this stage of my life I don't believe in an after life. Trust me it's not that I don't want to believe in one because I do. It would make it easier to grieve a loved one's death if I thought they had gone on to that better place that so many people talk about.
Lately I've been forced to take a closer look at my own mortality. I smoke and I know it is slowly killing me. I also have asthma so I am just compounding the matter. My lungs have hurt almost every day for several months now. In the last six weeks I have had bronchitis twice and pneumonia once. I'll be the first to admit that I probably wouldn't have gotten sick, or at the very least to the degree of pneumonia, had I not been a smoker. But I plan on quiting tomorrow so hopefully frequent illness will become a thing of the past. Honestly though it's not my own mortality that weighs on my mind. When I die I die. I can try to live a healthier life to prolong the inevitable, but as of right now there is nothing I can do to prevent it so it's not worth worrying about. When it happens it happens.
What does bother me is when I think of the mortality of the people I love and care about. Most especially my wife. I have noticed that since Kristen passed away I worry a little more about how I would be able to handle the news of my wife dieing. Ever since that day in September seeing or reading about death hits me a little harder. Every time I watch TV and the writers have set it up such that you think one of the main characters has died it hits me as if it were my own wife. Of course being the guy that I am I man up and don't shed a tear, but inside I am an emotional wreck and it's hard to talk after seeing those scenes. I can imagine what the loss might feel like because my friends passing wasn't all that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but I cannot begin to imagine what I would do with myself and how I would carry on.
I realize worrying about such things is a little foolish and is about as productive as rubbing two sticks together to try to start a fire (some people can accomplish the latter but I've never had any success). At the same time I know myself, and I know that this trend probably won't stop anytime soon. It's not preventing me from living my life, and I'm not preventing my wife from living hers. If anything, it has made me appreciate the time we have together even more. I don't take for granted that she be there when I wake up every morning or that she will be home when I get off work. I have learned to celebrate such occurrences because you never know when each one might be the last.