In order to have life, there must be death. I’ve been surrounded by loss lately and my reaction to it is becoming more peculiar with each passing. I guess being unusual is normal though, for everyone reacts differently to death.

It started when I was eleven years old and my aunt passed away from kidney and colon cancer. She left behind a teenage son and a loving husband. I didn’t know how to react since it was my first encounter with death. I didn’t seem to truly understand what had happened. When I was fifteen I had to put my three year old golden retriever to sleep and I was devastated. I had no desire to even function. I had lost my best friend. A great deal of the reason I was so upset was rooted from the fact that my dog, Buddy, was so young when he died. It taught me that life is precious and can unfortunately be cut heartbreakingly short.

A month and a half ago, my best friend’s dad died from a massive coronary in the middle of the night. Stephanie, my best friend, was the one who had to try and resuscitate him. When my own dad told me about the news, I had to make an effort to draw an emotion from myself: I was shocked. When we entered the funeral home for the wake, I watched Stephanie. I’ll never forget what I saw. She sat in a chair, people streaming past her giving their condolences. She sat in that chair, eyes glazed over, her skin devoid of all its caramel color—numb. When she heard my voice in front her she burst into tears. She sobbed uncontrollably and flung herself onto me. Stephanie was affected differently by her experience with death than I was. However, this was only her first encounter with loss, especially a loss of such enormity.

Two weeks after Stephanie’s father’s death my cat of fifteen years, Dutchess, had to be put to sleep. She’d been in renal failure for months and the vets were surprised she even survived for as long as she did. I went with my mom to the vet, just as I did with Buddy, and watched my Dutchess fall asleep forever. It was heartbreaking, but I could barely cry. I don’t know why. I feel as though I’m becoming emotionally paralyzed because I can’t seem to feel anymore.

My step-grandmother beat her cancer a year ago. Six months after she was “cancer-free” her doctors suddenly diagnosed her once again. Except this time her cancer was not just in her kidneys; it was in her liver, her bones, her back, and her bladder. She fought hard for another six months. She began to become so tired and weak she’d doze off while in the middle of a conversation. Towards the end of her life she unknowingly fell asleep in her chair while home alone and when she woke up she was so startled, she jumped up and fell, shattering her shin. Surgery was performed and afterward my Paw-Paw and she were informed that she would only have two to three weeks left to live. When they came home, we visited. There was a hospital bed in the middle of the living room with an unrecognizable woman lying in it. She was yellow from the jaundice and had a bag with bloody urine hanging from her bed. Three days after her doctor had told them she had two to three weeks left, her doctor announced that she now only had a few days left to live. She passed away two days later in her sleep. My Paw-Paw and her husband of thirty years is grieving, yet he is relieved she isn’t suffering anymore. He’s already given away all of her clothes and cleaned the house of most of her belongings because he feels as if he doesn’t get rid of them he’ll never be able to get over the pain of his wife’s absence. He says he’s lonely now and that at night it’s the hardest.

I believe an individual’s reaction to death is not stationary nor written in stone, but based on that person’s former experiences and fears. I think my past experiences and the amount of exposure I’ve had to death in my life has greatly affected how I cope with loss. When the death first occurs, whether caused by man or by nature’s will, I feel nothing. It’s as if my mind can’t seem to fully grasp the situation. I usually then force myself to cry in an attempt to feel like something is not emotionally wrong with me. The next step is forgetfulness or simply and completely not remembering that the death occurred in the first place. The final step is realization, real grief, and eventually healing.

Although death may physically close doors between living things, it also serves as a window that lessons, opportunities, and new discoveries flow through. However painful, death’s timing and circumstances have its reasons. These reasons don’t usually reveal themselves to us left behind immediately, but slowly over time and through acceptance.