Reflective Essay: Coping With Death

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Oblivion isn’t what scares me; it’s not the loss of my own life in which I fear it’s the loss of the lives around me. Even more than that I fear people dying before I get to tell them how much I love them. Death has always been a very emotional and personal experience for me. As a curious soul with stubborn ways death has always been hard for me to grasp and accept. I have such an overwhelming amount of compassion that it’s hard for me to cope with death.
I’ve always been sensitive to death whether it be family members when I was young or characters in movies, but there’s one death in particular that always will stand out.
My senior year of high school, March 24 2013, I had a friend commit suicide. Now don’t get me wrong Matt wasn’t my best friend: we didn’t hangout on the weekends, we
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We laughed and teased each other and hugged goodbye, not knowing that hug and that conversation would be our last. If I knew then what I know now, that hug goodbye was goodbye for longer than just a class period; I would have held him so tight. Knowing there’s not much I could have said or done to change what happened, I would have just liked to tell him how much he meant to me. I would have told him how much joy he brought me and how infectious his laugh was. I’d tell Matthew how much I had enjoyed being in the presence of his witty soul throughout the years. I would have told him I loved him, but this time I’d tell him with a more sincere and deeper meaning behind it.
That’s the thing about death though, you don’t know it’s coming. There’s no weeks notice, there’s hardly time to prepare, it just happens. If I knew then what I know now our last encounter would have gone quite differently. Unfortunately life doesn’t always work the way we want it to. Now it’s easy to say, “if I knew then what I knew now”, but the thing is we should treat every moment like it might be our

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