Intersection

18.04.07

"There are no random acts....we are all connected....you can no more separate one life from another than you can the breeze from the wind."

I have been reading Mitch Albom's novel, "The Five People You Meet in Heaven".

It is quite a simple premise really: a man dies and goes to heaven, where instead of the paradise he anticipated, he is taken through five visions of his life, specific events and panorama which changed him. The five people he meets are those whose significance wasn't necessarily that he loved them, but that his relationship with them marked and changed the course of his life. They represent an intersection.

"Fairness does not govern life and death, if it did no god person would ever die young." We already know that John. Forty-three is far too young to die. But it was your choice to override all over wills and put an end to it all. I wonder how you would react if you knew just how many people came to your funeral, if you could see how many lives you touched - literally hundreds.

The protagonist of the book, Eddie, asks why so many people came to his funeral: "it is because the human spirit knows, deep down that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small disance in being taken and being missed, lives are changed."

And we know this to our cost, sweet man. Our lives have been irrevocably altered. We spend our days listenting to the advice of those around us who love us and want the best for us, and in some part, who fear that we may meet the same fate. And so they tell us to move on, to accept, to not question why or how, but simply to assimilate this terrible blow and rebuild our lives as best we can. That death should not take us and that we should keep the happy memories close. That your life should not be marked by the one event that ended it but by the fullness of all that went before.

Good advice for sure. But not so easy to assume and follow. You are a part of us, you intersected with us and changed our lives. It is the hardest thing to continue on each day as though this is the most normal thing in the world. It isn't. You should still be here with us. There are a thousand things to remind us of you from the moment we wake to the moment we sleep again. Sometimes it feels, that to continue is in some way dishonest, you have departed and there is this empty space, the blinking void which serves to remind us of how much we miss you and how mcuh we would ive to have you back amongst us.

The perfect conundrum that we can never solve: to live without you as though it is perfectly normal and to return to how we were before that fateful day. Impossible.

And what if we don't want to? What if we are stuck at the intersection of where our lives met?