Of Death and Love and Grampa

Laugh if you want, but the last two nights in a row I have ended them sobbing - and I mean, snotty, hiccuping-type sobbing - over movies. No I won't tell you which ones. Fine, I will. Little Women and The Last Song.

Shut up.

My point in even mentioning that semi-embarrassing fact is that, for some reason or another, recently I have become aware that death is very, very close. And come uncomfortably close to those that I love in the last few years; like my dad, and my grandparents.

In my Intro To Music Therapy class this last week we talked about the older adult population - the Elderly. The group, with whom, for many of them, you mostly focus on quality of life versus improvement in Music Therapy sessions.

It's a strange thing to think about death, to read the chapter on aging; how your body starts to decay, and your very brain begins to deteriorate, and all the while your soul remains young and watches as the body it inhabits slowly falls away, eventually to return the dust from which it came.

My professor gave us the assignment to ask an older adult above the age of 75 to answer five questions we came up with about how it felt to age. I asked my grandparents. This evening my grandma emailed me my grandpa's response and - perhaps because I just got done watching The Last Song in which the father of the family dies of cancer - as I read the answers, I cried and cried and cried.

It hurt so much to hear. It scared me so much to read; to think about, to feel; to even imagine feeling.

But death is coming. It will arrive. And there is no way of stopping it.

So do I figure out how to deal with it before it comes? CAN I figure out how to deal with it before it comes? Is there some sort of class I can take on coping with terrible deaths before they occur so that when they happen, I have already mostly dealt with it and can move on? I guess not. Don't know if I even wish that.

One thing my grandpa kept hitting on: Love. You love and you love and you love, and as you grow older you begin to understand that that is all that is important: loving.

You can build empires, and invent the next iPhone app, win Dancing With the Stars and the biggest court case in the history of the 21st century. But love will beat all. You love: you cannot lose.