Life cycles and slows down and speeds up – until it doesn’t anymore. To think about dying is pretty much daydreaming. When it happens to someone close to you and their family, it hits something inside that simultaneously lets you know how far you’ve drifted from ‘reality’ and provides a path in that direction. Everything changes.
Cliches become truths. Light reveals more than it did before. The dark isn’t empty anymore, it’s teeming with truths that have been stripped and lacquered into directionless facts. There is nothing that can be said to make it any ‘better’…in fact, anything has the potential to prolong the process of processing what’s happened and what will happen next.
Fear of the dark is colder, closer and more horrifying because there IS a reason to be afraid of the dark. The most we can hope for is someone who will face it with us and be there for us whatever our reaction may be. For some, I think the darkness is a mirror, for others a window but whatever we see has already been within us for a while. Not all of us will have that someone but not all of us have this sickly awareness.
To be truly close to someone – it’s like Stannis Barratheon said: “hard truths cut both ways.” You want her to feel good not because it increases the likelihood of her reciprocating but because when she feels good, you feel good. And when she’s in pain, you are too. It seems like a rational thing, to strip life down to a series of facts but it isn’t like that, in my experience. No matter how deep you dig – or how far out you go – there is always more, just beyond reach.
Apocrypha, Shadow and Cold Light 