Shade of Blue

A Story by CeeTheWorld

This is not a story. This as an opinion paper that I wrote expressing my thoughts about death and how it makes me feel.

Death is real. The minute we realize that, it doesn’t just become real, it becomes reality. No one truly can understand the concept of death until he or she experiences it. It pushes us to accept a life we never even imagined we’d live. We never think about how our lives would be if the person we love most in this world, suddenly just dies. We were told not to think about it. Our minds cannot register the situation the way it does any kind of scenario we might come up with. We can imagine how our lives would be at a new college, or in a new house, or with a new boyfriend. But whenever we think about the possibility of someone we love, dying, our mind directly shuts it down. It is something so prohibited for us that it has become foreign. “Don’t think about it”, or “don’t say that, you’ll be fine”. That’s all we ever hear when we try to verbalize our thoughts about death. And the minute it happens, we cannot accept it because it is unknown, and we are afraid of what we don’t know. And death, it imposes itself on us and changes us forever. It’s as big a milestone in our lives as we’re ever going to experience. We are human. We are an essential component of our own story. We cannot detach ourselves from our own lives because our lives won’t exist anymore. And so is the existence of every single human being we encounter throughout our lives. They are as essential to our story as we are. That’s why death seems so strange. That’s why we feel blue whenever we hear of someone dying. It might be the grocery store owner, or the cab driver we rode with last night, or a classmate we knew fifteen years ago, it’s all similar. And having someone we love, actually die, it’s a whole new shade of blue. It’s a shade that covers all the other seemingly important colors of our lives. And even if time passes and we think we’ve moved on, we’ll never stop spotting that blue wherever we go and in whoever we meet. Death changes us. It makes us worry about phone calls after 9 pm, and routine hospital checkups, and words like ‘accident’ and ‘invasive’ and ‘crash’ and ‘attack’… It makes us change the way we deal with people. It dehumanizes us for a second, because we are now supposed to live in a world where a human being who loved us once, isn’t there anymore. Their love isn’t there anymore as well, and this realization detaches us from what makes us human, to the core. Death is romanticized in movies. It’s portrayed as a situation to bring families together, to understand the value of good things in life, to remember this person for the life they lived and celebrate their accomplishments. In reality, death tears families apart. Funerals destroy people. Talking about someone who died, becomes as prohibited as the concept of death once was, and we start losing the memory of this person consciously, while knowing that somewhere, in the back of our minds, it will still be there, haunting us for the rest of our lives. When we watch a home video of someone we love who died, we don’t smile. We don’t get flashbacks of the beautiful time we spent together. We simply cringe. It’s unsettling. It makes us feel all kinds of weird. It makes us feel guilty that we’re still here and they’re not. It makes us question our own existence. And in the literal meaning of the phrase, it explicitly and crucially breaks our hearts. And this is the worst feeling in the world. Death is not something we deal with. It’s within us. It’s the circumstance of our lives. It’s the most devastating and harshly inevitable wakeup call that we all experienced or will experience sooner or later. And it brutally breaks us.