Creating Life and Confronting Death

Because I thought I was alone in this...

I have talked with a couple recent mothers lately about their realizations of how fragile life is while they were pregnant and how much more they appreciate their partners/worry about their partners.

Like me, other women have admitted that they too fear losing their partners too soon- that a trip to the grocery store takes on extra meaning. They hug their partners a little longer and say I love you more frequently. They have dreams of their partners dying or being lost and unable to find them.

These are independent, self-made women who have "chosen" to be in a relationship freely and just as freely have always told themselves the door was always open to walk out.

They now have to grapple with overwhelming feelings of dependency, of primal needing to the point where if their partner leaves for the store to get milk and bread, they break out in a cold sweat thinking about how many dangers that trip is fraught within those few blocks.

Those who know me, who have grown up with me, or who have watched me grow up, who live with me... also know that I am not generally consequence-motivated. I am not terribly future-minded. I have always lived for the moment. Sometimes it means seeking instant-gratification, an escaping of responsibility, and an acceptance of easy answers. But it is also a strength.

Living for the now enables me to respond quickly in a crisis, to manage the complexities of any given moment and avoid the complications of "what-ifitis" that consequences to my actions may bring. And so for me, death- the ultimate and inevitable consequence of living, like many of my young counterparts, has been something rather abstract that happens to other people in other lives and hovers only around the periphery of my own life.

I do not fear death myself but I grieve the loss of those around me. The loss of a partner, the loss of a child, the loss of family members. Not because I worry about "what if" but I understand "what will".

It is not a crippling realization- it has been freeing and opens my heart instead of locking it. I have more appreciation in my life where I can practice profound gratitude, and be clear minded about what is important to me. How temporary and short it is, this life. I so look forward to my days today and those that wait just beyond. And in that sense, I still live for the moment, but more fully and with my eyes open.