The stark landscape of nothingness ...

A good friend of mine lost her daughter this week. I haven't had much exposure to death myself (knock on wood). I did study the five stages of loss and grief in developmental psychology, but reading about something and actually experiencing it are two very different things. This is what I've learned since yesterday.

Death makes you feel strange. Disconnected. Powerless. When attempting to come to terms with the shock and finality of it all, overwhelmed to the point of numbness. As much as I tried to fall back on impermanence for comfort, I found that it doesn't quite work. Perhaps my problem is that as attractive as the concept is, if you aren't truly enlightened (and I'm not), it means little when confronted with something real and not metaphorical.

My heart is heavy, not just because a beautiful, vibrant, 24-year-old woman tragically lost her life. I am also sorrowful because I think we may all lose her mother in one way or another. How do you recover from such a profound loss? Even with hordes of therapists, oceans of anti-depressants and stacks of self-help books, is it possible? Will my friend ever be the same person that she once was?

I don't think so. I can't fathom how I would cope in the same situation.

I will mourn them both. My friend is someone whom I greatly respect, and in the 12 years I've known her, she taught me many things. She taught me all the bad and/or inappropriate words in Spanish I know: pinche, borracho, payaso, to name a few. She also taught me that AC/DC is devil music, and that some people take offense to being called a "weirdo." She coined the term "fade-out zone" and also helped me to realize that when I say, "No, thanks I'm good," what I really mean is "Let's have another eight beers." More than that, and what I'm truly grateful for, she taught me how to treat people with respect, and what it means to show humility.

R.I.P. Mikaela Moreno

J. L. Dodd

"It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are." - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life." - Jack Kerouac

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