Archive for AE/BE
Death and all his Friends
We all know that life is a transition. The whole journey starts by being born and ends with death. So why, if we are so aware about the fact that everybody will be dying in the end, are we still shocked when someone dies. Shouldn’t we simply be able to accept the fact that this person’s journey is over? Or, if you are religious, that they’ve made their transition into … (insert: heaven, nirvana, etc…).
However, things aren’t this simple. The human mind and especially the feelings aren’t rational enough to accept the fact that someone is not among us anymore, at least physically. We are designed to believe in what we see, what we can touch or who we can talk to (religious people will now argue with me, but honestly, how many people wo are going to mass every sunday ACTUALLY believe in god because they do it from the bottom of their hearts and not because they were educated to believe it? If you are a true believe, I will bow before you. I really will, because then you have mastered something I am pretty sure I never will). So when a person dies, everything that makes us believe they’re still here is suddenly gone. In a second, the world as we knew it, changed.
So why am I sitting here, on the very other end of the world (Sydney, NSW, Australia) blogging about death. Because these things always seem to happen when I am away.
Yesterday my parents told me, that my mum’s best friend who was also a very very VERY close family friend in general and who I’ve known for all my life, had died. It was dark and she had forgotten her phone, so she turned around to walk back to the friend’s house. My mother stopped on the other side of the road to wait for her to pick up her phone. After she had crossed the street, a snowplough came and there was a big crash. My mother told me she thought the snowplough must have hit a tree. In fact, he hadn’t hit a tree. He had hit my auntie. My dad who was the first doctor to arrive at the scene, told me he thinks that she didn’t suffer and died immediately.
So for me, the worst about this tragedy, apart from my auntie dying, is that I can’t be with my loved ones, my family. That I can’t support the way I could if I was at home. And even though everybody’s telling me to enjoy my trip and get dristracted, it’s really hard to do this. This morning, I woke up with a weird feeling in my stomack. At first I coulnd’t pinpoint it, but then I suddenly realized it: I was feeling guilty. And of course, rationally I know, that there’s no reason to feel this way, yet still I do. It sometimes goes away, but in the end the feeling’s always coming back. It is the same feeling I had three years ago, when the sister of a very dear friend of mine got killed in an accident just a few days after New Year’s Eve. It was my year abroad, and even though I was home for christmas, I had to leave the very next day to return to Taiwan, thus leaving my friend alone in her unbearable pain. And I know that there was probably nothing I could’ve done to actually make her feel any better, yet I would have been there. I could have supported her by being at her side and not sitting on the other end of the world. So you see, these things seem to happen when I’m not around and it doesn’t make it any easier.
My worst fear is that I fight with one of my loved ones (friends and family) and then the person suddenly has an accident and dies and I never get the chance to tell them that I’m sorry and how much I love them. So this is why I will try to do things different from now on; I will try to always tell my friends and family that I love them, even if we’re not seeing eye to eye on certain things. Because in the end, this is all that matters.
So I will leave you with a song by Coldplay – ‘”Death and all his friends”. It’s a testimony to life. To enjoy it as long as you can and make the best of every minute. Because you really never know when it could be over.
I love you, auntie Marianne, and I am really glad I had you watching over me for wonderful 23 years.
Little Green-Eyed Monster
I sometimes feel like Kate Nash is taking the words right out of my mouth. Really, how many times have I felt like that? Definitely too often…
on crying in general
I’m not a huge fan of crying, I’ve never been. To me, tears make you seem weak, pitiful and vulnerable. Apart from that, they make your eyes red and your face go puffy. Wonderful stuff. I’m considering myself as a lucky person when it comes to crying – I used to cry a lot in kindergarden when I felt that I was being treated unfair. I really hated myself for that and it took me quite some time to put a hold to unflattering behaviour like that. I only cried twice when my grandfather, one of the most important people in my life, died more than 6 years ago. I didn’t cry when they told me he had passed away, I however did that very same night when I was sitting alone in a dark corner of my room. The second time it happened at the funeral. I just couldn’t bear all these people telling me how much my grandpa had loved me. After that there wasn’t too much crying, I only remember two other times: once because of a broken heart. I metaphorically cried a river over a guy who in retrospective wasn’t worth a single tear. The other time is probably the only time I was crying because I felt utterly loved and happy: it happened on a plane from Vienna to Amsterdam, a connecting flight to Taipeh. I was leaving Austria to study Chinese in Taiwan for a whole year and two of my best friends had surprised me at the airport and given me a farewell present I wasn’t allowed to open until sitting in the plane. Which was what I did. They had given me the most amazing gift ever: a notebook full of messages, pictures and drawings from most of my friends, all in all probably fifty people!!! I felt so much love during that moment that the tears just started streaming down my face. It was the only time I didn’t care about crying in public, even though I felt the looks of the other passengers. I could almost hear them thinking: “Oh Honey, you’re only going to Amsterdam.” Well, I wasn’t. I was going to live at the other end of the world and knew that many many people would be missing me.
