The other day, I came across a song from my past while listening to Pandora. It was "100 years" by Five for Fighting. It's really amazing how much differently I hear this song than when it came out in 2003. Back then I was almost 10 years younger than I am right now. And when I listened to the song for the first time in years the other day, it floored me at how profound the message truly is.
When this song came out in 2003, I lost three members of my family in the space of 12 months. None of the deaths were a major tragedy or a life cut short; but they were sad events nonetheless that were in rapid succession one after the other after the other. By the end of the year, the entire older generation of my family had passed on. My parents were now the family leaders. And when I look back at that period in my life, I feel that it changed me.
The first family member I saw lying in a casket was my paternal grandmother, who died in 1979. I remember standing on my tippy toes on the kneelers next to the casket, touching the body with my little fingers, asking if she were sleeping. Of course, she was not. I just didn't understand what death was, being only 3 years old.
In 2003, though, I knew what death was. At that point in my life, high school classmates of mine had already passed away. I was working in Miami, enjoying life, and then the call came. My father was on the phone, he sounded defeated. My grandfather had passed away. He had a heart attack and died while being brought to the hospital.
I remember the feeling that came over me a few days later, when they opened the doors to the viewing room at the funeral home in Michigan, and we all walked in to see our grandfather lying in his casket. When the initial wave of emotion passed at the first sight of the casket, it was replaced by a dull sadness. After we buried him, we all stood around and looked at my grandmother's grave, next to his. And it gave me peace to believe that they are together again.
A few months later, I got a tearful early morning call from my mother that my grandmother had passed away, her mother. This was a difficult time, as I remembered her very well, from the years that my grandmother had lived with us while we witnessed her decline with Alzheimer's Disease. I remember a sense of relief when she looked so peaceful in her casket, and I remember my uncle breaking down after commenting that my grandmother waited 38 years to be reunited with her love, my maternal grandfather, who passed away long before I was born.
I had begun to bounce back into my life when I got another call - that my step-grandmother had passed away, just four months after my maternal grandmother.
That was it.
She was the final living member of that generation of my family, and she had just died.
And she was a close friend of mine, who was my roommate for a few years.
It was a difficult funeral, not because she died young (she was 80) but because I never got to say goodbye to her. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and she went rather quickly. I knew she was sick, but suddenly she was gone. My last memories of her were of her gardening, watching horror movies with me on tv, and cooking dinner together. I was not prepared for her to be gone.
Those feelings returned when I listened to 100 years the other day. Not the feelings of sadness and loss - but different feelings. And it was amazing to me how differently I perceived the song at 35 as I had at 27. Now, I stop and listen, I let the lyrics resonate, and I look for the message and the meaning.
And I know that the message of this song is that life is fleeting. Every time we turn around, every time we blink, we will be in a new stage of our life. We have our hopes, our dreams and our naivety of our youth; which is replaced by the wisdom of our older years. The song taught me that while yes, life may be passing quickly, it taught me that life is a cycle. We go through changes, and we eventually pass on to the next life.
But still, even when we are gone, we are still here. We are still here in those that we left behind - in the new babies that our born each year, in the nieces and nephews that are graduating from high school, we are there in our siblings that raise their children with our blood and our genes and our mannerisms and our looks.
And once we have passed, we can look down from the heavens, looking down on our families, on the lives that continue to pass; we gaze on the cycle that continues again and again and again...and can say...
"I am still there."
