Into the Great Wide Open...

As many of you who know me know, i have always been a bit obsessed with the more macabre side of life.  I think about death, after-death, life after death, life in the midst of death, dead people... well, you get the point.  This morning, as i was washing the dishes and soaking up the fresh air flowing through the windows of the nearly sixty degree day outside, i started thinking about what people would say about me after i die.  hopefully it will be happy things...  


i began thinking about the people that i have known who have died, and what everyone's reactions were like.  one of my first real experiences with death was at 15.  a girl i was friends with died of a ruptured brain aneurism.  I will never, for as long as i live, forget the phone call that came in from my also 15-year-old friend.  I still shudder to think about those days- wandering the halls of high school as if we were the corpses, and not the living left behind.  Next was a boy i had grown up with.  He took his own life when we were in our early twenties.  I wasn't close to him then, and had probably not seen him since before we all went away to college, but i had known him and his family my whole life.  that was another rough couple of days, another round of phone calls that i will never forget.  There were other more intense visits from the reaper, but i'm not going to get into all of those today (i am in a good mood, after-all!)


fast forward ten years and here i am, sitting around thinking of LC again.  Another life taken, another world rocked.  another collection of e-mails, texts, and phone calls i will never forget.  and i think about her funeral- how wonderful it was (if one can dare call a funeral wonderful?)  how uplifting and positive the messages were.  how loved she was by the world.  i hope that the thoughts people have about me after my time has come can be even half as loving as they were about her.


that's where this whole thought process actually began- that i hope i am living a life that will be worthy of praise once i'm gone.  i try to be a good and moral person.  i try to be helpful and kind to others.  i care about my family and friends, and i hope that always shows.  i want people to talk about me with high regards when i'm gone.  


what will people say about you when you're gone?  are you living a life worthy of praise?  i wonder if we all lived our life thinking about that, the world may just turn a bit smoother sometimes!