If I Should Die Before I Wake
Death scares me.
The thought of being here, breathing, living, laughing, loving, existing one day, and poof being gone the next terrifies me.
The thought of never saying I love you to someone again, feeling rain against my skin, or eating Popeye's chicken at midnight scares me.
And, I don’t think it’s the fact that when you die you lose all sense of what it means to be on earth; I think it’s scary because of what you’re leaving behind.
The people, the places you’ve been, the things you’ve seen. They all just stop being in your grasp.
But in all honesty, I think that death happens while we are still living.
Parts of me have died and I’ve left them to stay buried in other people’s memories, hearts, spirits, and homes.
I’ve left people behind, I’ve left places behind, but most importantly… I’ve left myself behind.
I’ve died multiple times, trying to find rebirth and new growth, searching for the opportunity to become someone else, even though I haven’t fully buried the other parts of myself.
But how could I?
How can you die, peacefully at least, when you are still trying to dig up your own grave and the things that are in them?
How can you leave things behind, when you’ve let parts of yourself floating around. Leaving you vulnerable for them to attack at your soul at any moment? Leaving yourself vulnerable for them to bring up parts of you, you wish you could bury.
Maybe we only die once physically, but emotionally, spiritually, and mentally, we die multiple times.
We become ghosts in life trying so hard to stay in touch with things we know we need to leave behind.
And I think God tells us that.
He tells us when things are meant to be buried, and when things are meant to stay alive.
Maybe those things shouldn’t be in sight, but alive.
So, it makes me think.
If I should die before I wake…
I want to know that the parts of myself I had previously buried with other people were at least rooted in love.
That somewhere along the way I made a difference.
I want to know I didn't spend my life searching for ghosts that no longer existed, or exerting all of my energy into digging up things God told me needed to stay buried.
What kind of life is that?
What kind of living do we do when we can’t stop trying to bring back the dead?
If I should die before I wake…
I want to know that I didn’t just survive. I want to know that I lived.
There is a distinct difference between surviving and living.
“Survival is insufficient.”
Survival is simply trying to fight and deny death, living is embracing that it happens.
So, If I should die before I wake.
I hope I lived.