Everything I've Learned About Death I Learned from Blogging

It was a good thing for me that I figured out fairly early in my life that I leaned more towards Agnosticism than any certain system of beliefs. The series of deaths I experienced just as I was reaching adulthood, along with my thirst for knowledge on the subject of after-death, without the implementation of any organized religious beliefs, allowed me to take a step back, weigh all that was important to me, and carry on.

I've never been able to accept the polar ends of the options on what happens to us after death, and I've never once tried to convince anyone that I know the truth of it. I don't, but I think there are many things that should not be discounted. I think you may be doing you, your loved ones, and the person you lost, a dishonor if you tell yourself in moments of grief that "That's it" or "It's over, forever."

I did this to myself for ten long years. During those ten long years, I journaled, I jotted, I wrote letters to mothers who lost their children, and then I sucked up the idea of a painful rejection, and called them and read those letters to them. They always appreciated them.

They all said the same thing, "It feels really good to know that my child afffected the lives of others in a good way."

A loss I had witnessed two years before Steve's death and then another one five years after, left me so angry, so lonely, that even years after I lost Steve, I still regularly wished myself with him, with them. And what if there was no after-death? Well, to me, in those days, it was well worth the risk to find out.

In June of 2004, a full eleven years after Steve's loss, I began blogging. This was odd enough in itself as I had been a life-long journaler. My last entry in my hardcopy journal, before things went digital said, "Steve died," and I had not written one more word since.

I started my blog with the story of Ben, he had been my stalwart friend. He had been the only human I had ever known that deserved to be given the title friend since Steve's death. One with worth to match the label I rarely gave.

As I wrote out my own story, I began to see patterns, elements of my own story that I had missed. You can't see the forest for the trees, and maybe, you can't see the miracles for the grief.

I've never thought as miracles as something given as a gift by any dieties, instead always seeing them as wonders, marvels, phenomenon that I don't even care to try to explain. All I care about is that they were there... and somehow I missed them.