Maybe Don't Love Me So Much

It'll be better that way, right?

Think about everyone you know. Everyone you hold dear, love, share any sort of deep mutual feelings for. Your friends, your parents, your siblings, your children if you have them.

One of you is going to bury the other.

There’s no getting around it. It is inevitable. Death and taxes, right? One of you will mourn the death of the other and live some span of your life without them. Now ideally, we would all live long and fulfilling lives and children will bury their parents when they are old and the cycle would proceed in that fashion indefinitely. But this is not an ideal world, we are not ideal people, and these are not ideal times. So it becomes a matter of chance. We can do everything humanly possible to prolong our lives, and sometimes it won’t be enough. My father died because he got an infection that quickly went septic, and with other comorbidities there was not much that could be done for him after his systems began to shut down. Should he have taken better care of himself? Absolutely. Would it have mattered in the end? I’m not sure. But people die every day seemingly at random. A family friend died of a massive heart attack in his late 40s while on a run. Because he was a runner, in extremely good shape, and by all appearances very healthy. Didn’t matter. My mother-in-law had stage 4 lung cancer, for which she was undergoing aggressive treatment with surprising success, and died instantly from a stroke. My 30-year old cousin died of a fentanyl-laced heroin overdose after being clean for a couple of years. This happens all the time. Car crashes, aneurysms, bad falls, shootings, diseases, literally anything can take you out before your “time”.

I can’t help but look at everyone I know and love with this in mind. We won’t get into how unhealthy this is, because I KNOW. You don’t have to tell me. I’m aware. But either I will attend their funeral, or they will attend mine.

Maybe. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. I don’t have a large number of very close friends anymore, and possibly that is…good? I guess? You know that little saying that goes “and for my next trick I will hurt my own feelings by overestimating my place in people’s lives”? This has been me for as long as I can remember. I don’t know how to love people halfway. If I am all in for you, I am ALL IN. I’m your ride or die. I love love, and I love loving people so much. It took me a long time and suffering through the demise of many important relationships to realize that not everyone operates this way. I mean, I’m great! I’m fine, I’m a good time, I’m reliable, if I show up most people seem happy about it. But I guess nobody is really missing out if I don’t. Now I have my people, I’m not an island. But my circle is pretty small, though not by choice, and while I am desperate to be loved the way I love, maybe it’s better if I’m not.

I am saying this in a purely analytical way, by the way. I’m not in my feelings or despondent or anything like that. This is just how the world is.

I just think about how much I love people, and how much I love my dad, and how absolutely devastated I am about his death. And he was universally loved by everyone who knew him. I saw more fully grown men with guns cry at his funeral than {insert political joke of your choosing here}. People came out of the woodwork for him. I have never heard so many wonderful things said about a person than I did that day. How he was a mentor, a friend, a fantastic supervisor, a father figure to so many people I had never even met before. But he meant so much to them that they were wrecked about his passing. It is amazing to know this about my dad. I know what a wonderful man he was, but to see an entire community in mourning because of their love for this one man was extremely humbling.

As much as I long to be loved on the same level that I love other people, I think maybe it’s a good thing for people in general to not love me as much as I love them. That way they can say “oh what a shame, she was a wonderful person” when I die, and maybe they’ll be sad for a little bit, and maybe they’ll think enough of me to attend my funeral to support my family. Then life will go on and most people will forget about me and not have to experience this gut-wrenching agony I am feeling. There will already be a lot of people who will feel this despair when I die, I have a large family so whoever I leave behind will be devastated (hopefully). But maybe it’s okay if not. I hate the idea of people I love with my whole entire heart feeling this way when I die. So if I have to, I’ll do it alone if it saves my loved ones the heartache. I can handle it.

I think.

But yeah. One of us is going to bury the other. And we have no way of knowing which one of us will be left to handle these feelings. Be that as it may, I’m going to continue to love people because that’s what makes my life worthwhile. And I will be okay with whatever the outcome of that is.

Tell your people that you love them. Out loud. All the time. Make it weird.