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You could surmise that much of my writing of late has been about death and dying. Please do not mistake this for my being all morbid and macabre, because I am neither of those things. Death and taxes are a certainty for the everyman (and woman), but for me, death is just as meaningful as life. Of course life and death are inextricably linked but for me the connection is, to a point, existential.

Fifty-eight.

Fifty-eight friends are dead from Cystic Fibrosis and with each death, you leave a little piece of yourself behind. Memories constantly surface and there wouldn't be a day where I don't think about the friends who are no longer with me, their friends or their family. There are days when the deluge stings my soul and my skin, where I'm flooded with thoughts of the dead. This is where the process of 'self' debriefing comes to the fore. I will expand on that in a future post.

I go through stages where that mulch of memories of the life and death of a particular friend is branded into my brain. This is usually accompanied by night terrors and I'm grateful that I haven't had many this year. It got to a point last year where I was too frightened to go to sleep because I feared where my dreams would take me.

The sting of grief is exacerbated at night and I don't have to be alone. It can happen when I'm out with my friends, though they would never know. A personal hell is just that. It's personal.

Death sits uncomfortably in the belly of society. With all that has transpired, from childhood to adolescence to now, there is plenty of room for me to be damaged, stained, broken. Instead, I am tolerant and accepting of what has come to pass and what will come to pass, which brings me to my own mortality. At my core, I'm a happy person, but in all aspects of life there is illumination, as well as an underbelly of darkness. Without the darkness I wouldn't be who I am, and I like who I am. I am a good person. I'm certain of that.

Who would you be without your own darkness?

Would you like the person in the mirror, demons and all?

I will always question, challenge, hope and provoke. Simply put, it's the way I'm built. For now, I have just the one question (yes, expect more):

Can I write the ending?