“Run with it. Whatever your heart tells you to write about, I don’t think you should tell yourself no about what you felt called to write about.”

When your best friend encourages you to do something, trust them.

So here I am world, I am running with it.

This is going to be a deep one.  You’ve been warned.

I woke up this morning to find out that my childhood dog had passed away overnight.  While I am certainly sad and nostalgic when I consider she had been around since I was a child, I am forcing myself to find peace in that it was her time. We all have a time to go.  We may feel like it’s too soon or too far away depending on the state of life we are inhabiting.  But, we must all realize that we are never on our own time or we would all choose to live forever and be surrounded by the people we love the most.  We would never feel the pain of losing someone to the worst pain in the world: death.

I check my social media to only be reminded by memories of people I’ve lost over the years. I love and hate social media for this reason.  No Timehop, I don’t need to know about the dating mistakes I’ve made over the years.  No Timehop, I don’t need to cry today.  But, sometimes I’m like yeah, show me a good memory.  Give me a reason to smile.  Give me a reason for life after death.  Yesterday, it was Kylie.  It’s probably the last picture that her and I ever took.  And it’s so stupid looking, but it still makes me smile.  She looks so happy and I am making some idiot face to ruin the picture, per usual.  I imagine when I’m gone my funeral slide show will be full of pictures of me making stupid faces.  You are all welcome to laugh when you attend.  But, something about seeing her just made me happy.  Sometimes I forget the sound of her laugh, the contagious one, but then I see a photo like this and life and death suddenly make sense to me. She made me who I was then, and her departure has made me who I am today. I have faith that she is in a greater world and I will see her again, so I choose to live daily.

Yesterday it was Kylie.  Today, it was Idong. Idong died two years ago and I’ll never forget him and the impact he had on my life.  Idong understood the pain I had when I lost Kylie.  He spent many nights talking me through the roller coaster of emotions.  I remember texting him several times, sometimes at 3 am just because I was sad.  He was always there.  He was always there when somebody needed him.  And we both shared the same kind of love for Kylie.  Idong and I were always close, but death brought us together.  Death made us closer.  And, then death took us apart. Rest in peace to both of these angels, I love you both so much.

“I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart.  I am never without it, anywhere I go you go, my dear, and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling”

Death is such a weird phenomenon to me.  It leaves you with a tremendous array of feelings that you aren’t really sure how to understand.  Emotions flood your body. And,  you sort of feel like your own mind is drowning. The questions begin. When was the last time you spent with that person? How did your last conversation go with them? Did they go in peace? Were they ready to go? Did I tell them I loved them? Could I have been kinder? Could I have changed the path of their life that lead them to death? Is there anything I could have done? The answer is usually no, because we all have a time and it’s not for those left to understand.  If we were meant to understand we would all be told beforehand.

If you know me well, you know I’ve experienced my fair share of losing people I was close to at some point in my life.  I’ve been to too many funerals, written too many fair well letters to lay inside someones final resting place, written too many eulogies for people I loved so dearly, and said goodbye to so many way too soon. I’ve lost family, friends, guys who I’ve truly loved, and the pain is all the same.  Sometimes to a different degree, but the aching pain of wishing you had just a little more time is all the same.  The worst part about experiencing death is that unfortunately  it never ends.  I was young when it began for me – losing an uncle, and since then I’ve only experienced more, deeper, pain.  But, the pain and the experience has truly made me a different person.

It’s different for everyone when you lose a loved one.  Sometimes it hits you immediately that they are gone, sometimes it takes months and all of a sudden you walk into a place that reminds you of them or you hear a song on the radio and you instantly lose it.  When my best friend died, I was nineteen. At nineteen I could barely decide if things were supposed to go in the microwave without calling my mom (I was a little helpless).  How was I supposed to go on with my life without the one person who knew every secret about me? I had no idea.  I was in shock.  I still remember the phone call to my parents to tell them that she had passed, and even they didn’t believe it. You don’t want to believe the news.  Reality is the hard part.  Not being able to call your best friend when you’re sad, when you have good news, when you find out the dirt on so and so.  You have to find a new reality that doesn’t involve all of those things.  At first my new reality was to spend a lot of time with the people who loved me, it kept me from crying all the time.  Then I visited her grave on the regular.  Like, middle of the night drove to see her grave, multiple times.  That was comfortable to me. Everyone thought I was a little crazy for the late night drives to the cemetery, but sometimes I just needed time alone and some good music.  Everyone gets to choose how they grieve.  My advice is to never allow the opinion of someone else to dictate how you grieve, or how long you grieve.

I didn’t really have the breakdown moment with Kylie until it had been a couple months. Everyone needs this moment. Coming from someone who typically bottles up emotions, it’s necessary to really make an attempt at moving forward. All of my friends knew it would happen, they were just all kind of unsure when it would. They all hovered around me, waiting for it to happen.  And, it did.  I cried for days.  Sometimes every weekend.  Living in an apartment that I had once shared with her.  I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself, feeling alone, and trying to pretend like I was fine to everyone around me. I developed severe anxiety and depression. It took me sometime to see the light, but I finally did. I needed to grieve.  I will never apologize for that, because that was what I needed in order to grieve.  Never apologize for grieving. I cried alone a lot because I’m a really ugly crier and I’ve put on this persona that I’m just this bad bitch (most of the time I am, but this time I wasn’t). I needed my best friend back.   It was incredibly hard.  I was a really unhappy fake-it-till-you-make-it person.  But, I got through it. And, life taught me that better days would come.

I learned a lot in the years to come.  I learned that I would have days where everything would go exactly as I had planned.  I learned that days would go completely opposite as planned. I learned you can’t let what happens in life define you and make you a miserable person because that’s a really easy rut to fall into.  Bad things are always going to happen.  Good people are always going to go before it’s their time.  Be sad about it. Be mad about it.  Question it.  And, one day you’ll have this ah-ha moment: the only thing I can truly control in this universe is my own energy and how I choose to exert it.  Every day is a new day and I’m still learning.  But, most of the time I choose to be happy and positive.  I’m probably the happiest I’ve been in 5 years. Like any other human, I have some trying moments but God and I are trying to work on my patience.  Life after death has brought me some of the most beautiful, influential, strong, positive, and just down right freaking great people who I am incredibly thankful for. Some that have stuck around since the beginning, some that have seen me through the aftermath.  You are all detrimental pieces of my life and I care about you all so much. Life goes on, so go on for the ride, and choose to be happy.  Hug your loved ones, tell them you love them, spend time enjoying their presence, and never take for granted a second you have with them because I can promise you this much – you’ll never get it back.

-Hannah