Death Begat Life, Life Begat Death

I’ve been reading through the old testament and new testament simultaneously for quite a while now.  Something I’m noticing there and in the world around me is just how important death is in bringing about life.  It’s hard to wrap my brain around sometimes.  It’s like I’ve always kinda pictured death as a finishing line for life, just one straight shot.  And when I saw death around me, in all of its forms, my heart broke ever so slightly and sometimes not so slightly.  Death of animals, death of relationships, death of opportunities… They all grieve my heart.  It’s almost as if I’m stuck in Groundhog Day.  Like death just keeps happening and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for it all to be over, in a sense.  Not my actual physical life, but my life as I know it.

But death and life, their more like counterparts, I think.  Death actually causes life, if you think about it.  I mean, Semisonic made that quite clear:  Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.  I’m not saying death came before life, it’s kind of a chicken or the egg scenario.  The death of singleness brings about the life of marriage.  The death of marriage brings about the life of singleness.

Death and life all have their time.  Neither one is really a destination, but a passing point.  One and then the other.

I’ve gone through so much death, probably not more than anyone else, but it’s like I never knew that death was okay.  I just squinted my eyes, put my fingers in my ears, and pulled my sweater over my head, waiting for the pain to come and hopefully pass.  But it doesn’t need to be this way.  In fact, it’s really not that way at all.

In the past few years, I’ve slowly come to this place, little by little, death by death.  I don’t feel that I’m calloused to death, just… educated… experienced.  I’m not bitter, I’m seasoned.

More than just these past few years, I’ve experienced quite a bit of this death in my heart.  Death of dreams and expectations.  Death of self indulgence.  And, oddly enough, perhaps even the death of my own martyr spirit.  And now, with confidence, I can say that I am okay with it all.  I’m nonplussed.  I see death now more as a necessity and less like an enemy.  It kinda reminds me of the quote from the tale of the three brothers.  When the oldest brother had lived a full life, he greeted death and parted as friends.

And that’s where I am now.

So what does this all mean?  For starters, I think this blog needs to die.  It started at a happy place in my life, much like this one, and went through 3 years of the worst deaths I could have never imagined.  And without a healthy sense of death, I fear this place was poisoned with a sort of hopelessness that I can no longer identify within myself.  These aren’t the light stories I’d imagined, these are Greek tragedies.

And while so much of that part in my life has been documented here, I would like to move on without any feeling of guilt for the mess of a blog that I can’t fix.  Simply put, it just needs to die.

I do enjoy writing and I will likely continue to write, but it won’t be here.  It will be somewhere, and likely another wordpress, but it will be different.  I am different.

When I get that sorted out, I’ll be sure to post one last time to tell you where you can find me again.  In the meanwhile, thank you for your support of my overly public trials.