Death Paper
I have always feared death for it is the one frontier we have not and probably will not conquer. Our family has been lucky
and only two or three deaths have occurred. But I remember each one very vividly, especially my Great-Grandmother's funeral.
She died of a heart attack in her sleep. Unlike the book it was not suicide but we still lost someone very close to our family.
When I was told that she was gone, I could not grasp the idea that I would not see her again. We were pretty close, I called her GG, and the last time
I saw her was two weeks before she died. At her funeral many people I knew came, and some new faces also appeared. Jim and I acted similar at
the funerals, because we both had trouble looking at the people who were most affected. I had the most trouble looking at my grandmother, GG's daughter, and Jim had trouble
looking at Antonia. " I had trouble looking at Antonia. She put her arms around Yulka and held the little girl close to her."(PG 95) As the oldest child it was my duty
to spread her ashes over the river and in the woods. I remember looking into the urn and being enveloped by the darkness. The gray of the
ashes and the black of the urn made my heart wail in agony for her. I slowly released her into the wilderness, and let her be free in my heart. I never forgot that day, and I
never will for it is a page in my life that I realized that no one could be immortal, no matter how much you loved them or they loved you. It is all part of a cycle
that ensures that the planet won't become to over populated and individual feuds wont last into eternity. When I read the section of the book about what Jim
thought had happened to Mr. Shimerda's sprit, it made me think of my GG and whether her sprit had been released into her favorite river. " I wondered whether his released
sprit would not eventually find its way back to his own country… No, he would not at once set out upon that long journey. Surely his exhausted sprit, so tired of cold and
crowding and struggle with the ever-falling snow, was resting now in this quiet house." (Pg 83). When I think about that day I am still somewhat saddened but sadness isn't
always bad. When that happens I try to think of happy things about her. For instance the last time I saw her I went into her bedroom and I helped her pick out a dress. She was telling me about how magicians deliberately confuse their audience so they can do a trick. When she was
done talking she had put on her dress backwards and called me a magician. This is one of my fondest memories of her and I will always treasure it. Recently one of my friends had a death in their family. Her dad had died in his sleep, and she did not find out until after school. I was shocked and the same feeling of dread I had felt as a young girl came back. We did not go to the funeral because it was for family only. Even though I was not close to him, I knew, sort of, how it felt to lose someone. I sent her emails and we talked on the phone, she said she was okay but I knew she was just trying to get over it faster. Eventually she became happy again, and her mom and her started their life again. I will never think of a death as
just another occurrence, it is the ending of their life and the beginning to the family they left behind. I will probably always fear death, for no one has or will tell us about what is the after
life. But when the time has come and we do die, we will be confronted with it and we will have to take what we get and just go with it.
