Death Is Not Something We Undergo Ourselves

Death is not something we undergo ourselves when we leave earth. Death is what we leave behind. As we venture from this life into the bright white peace of heaven, the stagnant grey of reality cloaks the hearts of those that once loved us.
When I lost her, I saw death more in the eyes of her fiancé, of her mother and of myself than I would have ever seen in her eyes. Nothing left of worth in her earthly body but what the eyes of her soul beheld was much more like life than we that are alive are ever likely to see until we join her.
Why is it that when I look to God, my vision is blurred by the multitude of stars that line the floor of heaven? My smallness of spirit, my incipient nature brings me closer to him than any great show of strength that my too-human mind can create. Why? Why is it that the closer my tower of babble reaches to heaven the farther I fall away from gaining access to perfection?
I loved her. I loved her and mourned her.
I mourned her more like a lover than as a friend. But then, I have never been comfortable with the line between friendship and passion. I have always felt that if a soul is worthy of my friendship that they are also worthy of my love, my passionate soul-wrenching love. I have never been one who loved in levels…the flesh and the soul are completely separated in my mind when I think of love.
I loved him. He loved her. She loved me. He hated me. She distrusted him. I trusted them. In my mind I have grown to connect them. I knew him through her. She grew to love me because I was drawn to her through him. If not for one, then the other would not have known me, not at the level at which they did. They were my first two loves. She left me. He betrayed me.
He touched me. He killed the child I was and holds partial credit for the woman I became.
They both left me and I walk on alone.
She died and left this earth for heaven. He lived and died inside. He lives every day in the hell of moral purgatory.
I live every day in the pursuit of heaven…desperately trying to escape this hell.
I live every day to prove him wrong.
I think he is dead. I do not feel his spirit here on earth. Has he truly left this world or has his spirit continued to bleed out upon the war-wasted earth that he so hates that he no longer lives, regardless of whether his feet continue to tread soil?
Death is not something we undergo ourselves when we leave earth. Death is what we leave behind. As we venture from this life into the dark blood-drenched hatred of hell, the stagnant grey of reality cloaks the hearts of those that once loved us.