I didn’t know at the time that my marriage was ending. I don’t know if these feelings were in part because I was nearing the end of my 20+ years of marriage or not. When Misti died in 2007, it made me feel pessimistic, and I wondered what the point of all this daily striving was, since we all cease to exist someday and life moves on just the same without us, who are barely a blip on the screen. Both of my siblings died in recent years: My older sister, Misti, died of a ruptured brain aneurysm at 46, and my younger sister, Kathy, the person I was closest to for the first half of my life, died of a heart attack at the age of 49.Īs I consider their deaths now, I can see in hindsight, through the prism of distance, that grief has had something to teach me. Life can be terribly lonely after the death of someone we loved most, and grieving, I’ve learned, is necessary work. And contemplating one’s own death is very different from dealing with the death of a loved one - a child, especially, or a parent, sibling, or spouse. I certainly don’t mean that death is easy, or that I view it the same way I would lying down to take a nap.
Without death, life would lose its meaning - they are the yin and yang of our existence, the one nothing without the other.Īfter more than half a century I’ve come to understand that the bittersweet quality that accompanies virtually every human endeavor is, in fact, the very thing that is most precious about life because whatever we do or become or love is, in the end, transient. I don’t mean to imply death doesn’t or shouldn’t have power over life. Photo © 2016 by Sonny Bohanan.Ībbie, I agree with you that our avoidance of the topic of death gives it an unhealthy power over our lives. Background: Burnett Plaza, the tallest building in Fort Worth. Foreground: Man with a Briefcase, a 50-foot-tall sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky.
Burnett Memorial Park in downtown Fort Worth was donated by the late oilman/rancher Samuel “Burk” Burnett in memory of his two “lost” children, who died young.
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