I am not greater than death; I just understand his position.

I am at peace with death.

No, not in the sense that one who is suicidal has come to terms with the lack of options and chooses to kill themselves. No, not in the sense of a loyal military soldier going off to war. In this chilling sense, I am genuinely surprised I wake up every morning.

It sits with me like a cold June morning, where the air is crisp, and the wind kisses your cheeks, but the sun is warm, and the air is comforting. I’m not miserable; I don’t want my peace with death to be misconstrued into something other than what it is: an understanding of the end of a life.  Death to me is a fact, a known understanding. We expect everything on earth to come to an end at one point. It is truly surprising to me that people do not have a better relationship with death. I remember the day I made peace like it was yesterday. 

It was 2022, and I was living in that ratty apartment by Henderson. The August heat was killer that year, and Brennan came home with both COVID which later developed into bronchitis. I had gotten both, and plainly wasn’t handling it very well. I remember being so tired, feeling really deeply uncertain that if I closed my eyes again, I would wake up. It was truly peaceful but deeply chilling. Like I stared into the abyss of Tartarus and realized it had no grip of fear on me any longer. I found that death wasn’t something I could ever control; it’s so out of our reach. I realized that there is no true understanding if God is real, whether there is an afterlife, and that it’s subjectively arrogant to think one could do enough “soul searching” to figure it all out, and claim to know the objective truth of our universe. 

So I let it go.

I accept that what I’ve done has been done; it is written in stone. That if there was something for me to do, it was truly for me to do it. What we do is honestly meaningless, but to waste the gift of life is to win the lottery and throw the money in the trash. The world is deeply overwhelming. I have so many ideas and so much desire to reach certain goals and make things better wherever I go. I have no other desire than to bring relief to people, because all I see is others in pain. All I see are humans walking around, hurting from just existing day by day. 

Maybe it’s the sick joy of making someone's day, or the entertainment of allowing myself to enter everyone's stories, even for just a second, and hopefully making a good impact. If I could enter into everyone's life for 3 seconds only, to only allow myself to ever be known for no longer than a single transaction, I would do anything to alleviate some of the misery it is to be human. 

We are such god-awful, whiny, sad, pathetic creatures; it’s almost cute how we flail around pretending to understand anything at all. I can’t bother to waste my time; it feels so much more limited than everyone else's. My body continues to fail more and more each year. I truly do not know if I will see 35. But dying at 35 truly doesn’t bother me- but I really want to make sure that when I’m there I can think to myself honestly, and with 0 delusion, that I did my best, I did good, I impacted others in a positive manner, and I was the change I wanted to happen. I want to be proud of who I was when I die because I am only accountable to that person.

 Who I am in my final breath.