HW 17

Dying has been a thought on my mind since I can really remember. I used to think about it a lot when I was younger. It is my greatest fear.

At the age of eleven I experienced the pain of death for the first time when my uncle, Ira, died of lung and brain cancer. I didn’t really know my uncle because he lived in Arkansas but it was still heart braking. My next encounter with death was when I was fourteen and my oldest and closest grandfather of 97 died peacefully of old age. This showed me that death could be “simple” and clean. This death for me was foreseen still I could not accept it. Then when I was fifteen my other grandfather died of a heart, he was the healthiest person I knew. He exercised every day by swimming and jogging. This event was outstanding to me that someone so healthy could just die with out warning. Nine month ago my grandmother died of old age. I was very close to her because I never knew my grandfather and it really hurts me that I couldn’t ever see or talk to her again. Then two month ago a big tragedy happened in my family, my other uncle died of a sudden stroke. I had seen him not one month before when he was visiting me from San Francisco. This felt unreal to me because it still felt like he was in my living room talking to me. I was very close with him and to here him dying was not acceptable to me. In the same week I had a friend kill her self by hanging. I had never thought I’d have a friend commit suicide. At this point in my life death was vivid and as real as it got but I had not flinched when I heard all this news I always just sit in silence because it all felt unreal. Till I cracked and could not hold the pain of death in anymore because real life had set in.

Death has changed my perspective on live. My family has past away so fast and I have felt the pain that my friend had felt before. I now always try to make life as fun as possible and do as much as I can in the time I have. All these people that have died have there own meaning and story in my life that makes me who I am. I’m scared of dying or wait, am I scared of the unknown. Just as I was afraid of the dark when I was four because I didn’t know what was in the dark. Does dying lead to something else’s? What happens after? That’s what I want to know. Why do we live now if we one day we die and then for all we know don’t know anything, don’t think, see, hear, just nothing. I will never have known I wrote this for Andy my 11th grade sociology teacher. This area is a place of weakness for me. A place I don’t like to enter in my mind because I suppress as much id it as I can because I can’t candle the truth. But what is the truth.