Dealing with Death

This past weekend a close friend of our passed away. He was only eighteen. That's just mind numbing to me. He was only eighteen. Eighteen. I'm nineteen and I have never lost someone very close to me, especially not that close to my age. It's a shock.

I now have death on my mind. Not in a morbid way, it's just that I can't stop thinking about it. My mom and I have been going back and forth this summer about death, most about how to handle and prepare for it. This just was an awakening for us. 

I've never been good at dealing with death. I've only been to three funerals in my life. My grandmother's, my baby cousin's and my best friend's great grandmother's. Talking, even thinking about death upsets me deeply. I just don't have the ability to deal with it, but I don't want to be unprepared for it either. 

How do you prepare for death? How do you accept that people die? How do you deal with losing someone close to you?

These questions have always plagued me, and they still do. It'll probably take me a while to find the answers, or at least comfort in the fact that there isn't one set way or answer to death.

I'll probably never be okay with death, but I do find a tiny, tiny bit of comfort in the fact that maybe somewhere up above there are guardian angels who are looking down and protecting us. 

That's the bright side view on death. 

I leave you, dear readers with this quote from one of my favorite authors. 

“That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.” 

― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever