Death has always been a hard concept for me to comprehend. I always had trouble accepting and believing in the permanence of this state where life has left somebody entirely. I never believed when my parents told me that somebody who has died will never again walk, never again talk, never again feel, all the things that make us human, flawed jagged and incomplete, but most of all, alive. Never again would somebody have a moment that takes their breath away, a moment where they get to experience the beauty that this world encompasses, never again have the feeling or sensation of touch and love. Maybe that’s what makes the time when somebody passes and leaves us behind the hardest of all moments.  We feel hope, longing, sorrow, anger, horror, and a wave of depression overcomes us with a force stronger than any other. For some of us its strong, some of us its faint, it affects us all in different ways.  It’s a time in which we feel that nothing can ever be good again that life cannot go on, but most of all it’s a time where we need others the most. Death has a way of uncloaking everybody around you. It strips everyone down to their core and makes them more vulnerable than ever before. This dark devil swoops upon us all and helps us to feel what we have been so scared to feel before. We feel regret for the ones that we hurt, we feel betrayed by the ones who left us behind and we feel hopeless for the times we can never get back. We learn who we truly love and who truly loves us, we reach out to embrace and to be embraced. Most of all though, we learn a lesson, we learn that however evil this foul beast called death claims to be, however fearful or confused by it we are, that we can go on. We can pick up the pieces of our much too shattered hearts, wipe off our salty tears and slowly put ourselves back together again. We learn to celebrate all that the dead came to offer us and all that we will do to help them live on, we learn to love more fully than we had ever loved before. We learn that this stranger who eventually will pay us all a visit comes sooner for some. We hold our loved ones just a little tighter, kiss our soul mates just a little harder, make amends with those we have betrayed and set out to find peace in this time of need. We hold our heads higher, sit a little straighter and think a little longer and we soon realize that its in that moment with all of its impurities when we finally realize that eventually, we can all fly free.