the end is not yet

Two people from Christa's Mississauga circle of friends died last week. He was 27, the papers said she was 21 - though I thought at the funeral her dad said she was 20. They were a couple. A car turned into the path of their motorcycle.

I'd met them only three times over the last two years, yet it upset me. Her death more than his, which seems odd because they were together each of the three times. Probably because Christa was closer to her than to him and probably because we went to her funeral and not his. And maybe stupidly because her name was Chrissy, short for Christina (and similar to Christa).

What I can't believe is that it keeps hitting me. She's dead. It doesn't compute.

I don't know why I can't believe that. It's the same way I've reacted to any of the deaths of people I've known, even if the intensity of the reaction is naturally less than some of them.

It's not a lack of maturity about death, or a lack of experience with it. I think it's just the way I - and probably others, though I won't speak for anybody else - react to it. Like the person who has died was a part of one story and that the story changed or ended without any kind of transition or climax or even a conclusion. One second this, the next something quantitatively different and intangible that is utterly, and by definition, inconsistent with everything that came before.

It doesn't seem to matter whether the people I know who have died were young or old, healthy or ailing. It doesn't matter whether the death was sudden or expected. Nor does it matter how intensely their passing affects me. That sense of a new reality constantly jarring with what came before is always the same to me.

Yes, I recognize that I'm not talking about Chrissy anymore. Really, that's as it should be since I didn't really know her and have no right to go on about her when there are so many people who did know her and who are devastated and shattered by her passing. I won't talk about her, but I will talk about how I'm reacting as a result of her death.

What gets me the most about this death is how much it scares me. It could have been Christa, or my sister or anybody. Hell, it could have been me. It's not that this taught me the fragility of life, or instilled an awareness of how death can come unexpectedly. I've been dealing with that constantly since I watched that guy die in a car crash when I was fifteen. For years, every time I say goodbye to someone, there's a part of me that whispers this could be the last time. Either because I die or they do.

What I'm saying is that death is never far from my mind, though 90 per cent of the time I don't feel anything about it. But ten per cent of the time it scares me or makes me absolutely bloody furious.

This is at the core of my little raging freak out a couple weeks (and two posts) back. As Jer pointed out, I'm only in my twenties.

But who knows how much time I have to do what needs doing?