Death is a reason to live

Do you make New Year's resolutions? I usually make resolutionesque decisions or mission statements around the turn of a year. Sometimes it's the turn of my years and I'm celebrating (read: agonising over) a birthday, or it's along with everyone else at the New Year. This year, my theme was "It's time to admit to your dreams" and I really felt a lot of affinity for the idea. How many people actually run after their dreams? I think that the answer to that is also the reason why people are so riveted by stories like Henry Ford's, Alek Wek's and Ted Jobs'. Not that many people. It seems to be far more remarkable to be too busy just trying to get by to think about vain things like your hopes and dreams.

This year though, about three people in my life very suddenly passed away. Now, before you call me up with condolences, let me explain. None of these people were very close to me, but they were still very present family or friends that I had known most or all of my life. Heart attack, cancer, a viral infection. One of those things took the life of forty-something year olds, leaving a shocked mass of loved ones in their wake.

As I sat in the funeral of one of the diceased family friends and his father sat quietly in the row ahead of me I wondered if his son had seen Paris and stood on the Eiffel tower; I pondered whether he had loved so strongly that it made him cry; if he had painted his bathroom purple (if that was something he'd wanted to do). I looked around at his bereft friends and wondered if they felt they could have said "I love you" just one more time. If I hadn't done it before then, I vowed to see and do all those things I wanted to. I don't want to realise that I'm dying and I haven't told those beautiful, amazing people that I love them, that my life is so much better because they walked in it. I will fight hard to be everything I can be to everyone in my life.

Imagine coming to the end of your life, wasted, weary, blissfully spent because you opened your heart to others, you burst the banks of your spirit in the pursuit of God, you wore your knees out walking around the world and you lived.

Imagine that.