EMBRACING THE BREVITY OF HUMAN LIFE

I would love to start this piece by honoring the lives we've lost over the last few years. It has been a very difficult time for a lot of us and I would like us all to take a moment of silence in memory of the loved ones who are not here with us today.

May their souls rest in peace and may their families find strength and peace. Amen!

With all the tragedy happening around us, one catastrophe after the other, it can all get overwhelming to the point that we opt instead to hide from it, in an effort to escape the heaviness of that loss that just doesn’t seem to go away. Except, there is no good in tainting our lives with the delusion that the grief doesn’t exist – or that it wasn’t here to start with. Where there is life, there must be grief, and it is upon us to embrace this, and not look at death as something we need to keep sweeping under the rag. So, brace yourselves, because this piece will be entirely based off of loss.

A few weeks ago, I was speaking to a colleague of mine and we were talking about a mutual friend that had lost their life. My colleague ended up saying, "When I die, I want people to say that I lived!"

The statement itself is self-explanatory, however what she really meant was that as much as we shall be sad that she'll not be with us anymore, she’d want us to also be grateful that she offered herself a full life, even if it was cut short by the blade of human mortality.

To be frank, I feel a certain type of way when people say, "You only live once" because that implies that we have only one chance to do all the things we want to do and experience all the things we want to experience which, in my opinion, is not true! We have a million chances in every single day, so I'd rather we say "You live everyday" because that's essentially what it is!

I'm extremely grateful that I have the chance to share my days with all of you. I pray that God looks upon us with mercy that we may have the opportunity to live our lives to the fullest, that even when it's time to go to our maker, our hearts won't be so troubled. We shall be able to say we lived our lives and the people we left behind won't feel like we have missed out on too much.

We shall be peaceful in our rest because we'd have done the things that made us excited about life and made the most of our time in this world.

I truly believe that death is one of the things we should practice talking about more. Even though it might never be okay because death leaves deep wounds and voids in our lives, so talking about it will never be easy but at least we shall know that grief is a shared experience; which makes it a little less painful because none of us will then have to carry the weight of that loss on their own.

As we normalize the fact that death doesn’t have to be a taboo subject, I would also want us to practice living every day like it is a gift because that's in fact what it is, life is a gift; every breath, every second more spent on this world is to be cherished. Some days may not be as great as others but we need to be intentional about finding something to be grateful and thankful for.

Being excited for your days makes living them more fun; being enthusiastic about being alive is one of the reasons that keeps me curious and in anticipation for what life has in stock for me, it pushes me to never hold back and make the most out of my experiences and my connections with the people I hold dear to me.  I want the same for you too; a zeal for life that will set you all on a path to living all your days to their fullest, after all, we are all in this world for a brief moment!

BY ATIM MARY ANN