It's only been a couple of days, but the more I think about the news, the less real it seems. The most real and powerful moments were when I first heard about it on Saturday morning (even though I kept saying, "I can't believe it..."), and now it feels like it just can't be true. Like M. will be a friend I just sort of lost touch with after college, instead of a friend who is dead.

Grief kind of sucks, as do the mind games I play with myself. For instance, I find myself wondering things like,

"Should I be crying more for her?"
"Should I be more upset?"
"Should I be less upset?"
Etc.

Sometimes I feel exhausted at my need to want to do things "the right way" all the time, but there's no one right way to do nearly anything, most especially grieve. So, it's all okay. However the course of this goes, is the way it's going to go, and I'll just have to roll with it.

I cried a lot on Saturday and haven't really cried since then (even though I've been thinking about her so much). In fact, yesterday, we went about our previously made plans to go to Disneyland during the day with Ruthie, and her daughter and friends. And then at night, Joe and I went to the American Idols concert. So all in all, it was a really wonderful day.

There were moments I felt like crying, though. We watched the "Snow White" play at Disneyland, and when the prince kissed Snow White while they all thought she was dead, and then she awoke, and they were all so happy, I thought, "Why can't real life be like that?" And I couldn't help envisioning M. lying down with her arms folded, like Snow White, except that M. won't ever get up again, no matter how hard the people who love her wish it could be. Tears stung my eyes when I looked around at all the kids clapping, the kids who have no idea how scary life can be, the things they may face, how fragile life is. Their blissfully unaware innocence is almost too much sometimes.

Then, during the American Idols concert, Mandisa made some comments about God, about how God will make your dreams come true. And I wanted to shout at her, "What about M.'s dreams??" and felt really sad and angry. I cried a few tears then, too. That is the danger in believing in a conscious, decision-making, type of deity, I thought right then. If you do, you run the risk of feeling incredibly let down somewhere along the way. This is why spiritual things confuse me. I want to believe. I still kind of do believe in some kind of... something, out there in the universe. But when tragedies occur, it is really hard to keep a grip on even that. I don't know what to think sometimes.

I'm glad I've had some happy times yesterday and today, though. M. was so happy go lucky that I'm sure she would have liked to see that. I can just picture her running around to each of our tear-stained faces and saying, "No, no! Stop! Get up, go have fun!" In the one quarter I knew her, she was always a little bossy, and it always made me laugh. I just can't help feeling so sad when I think of her, though, when I think of her whole family and her very best friend who was also in our Psych class, when I think of how many people are affected by losing her. And of course, I feel sad on a larger scale, too, sad because... eventually we will all die. And that is a fucked up thing to think about. We're supposed to go about our business and plan for when we all live to be 100 years old. But what about when that doesn't happen? It's so heart wrenching.

I am SO, SO lucky and grateful for the life I have, the family I have, that I've never lost a spouse or sibling or parent, that I have my health, mental and physical, that I have Joe, my friends, my pets, and the potential for a lot of wonderful things ahead of me in life. I just feel so lucky that I have those things, and so awful that M. doesn't anymore. I ache for M.'s sister and the rest of her family. She went off on her very first trip, a vacation to Europe, and never got to come back home. She was one of the people I wanted to keep in touch with from school. I was just waiting to get an email from her saying she was home, waiting to swap pictures and stories from our travels. And now... It's just shocking. And hard. And incredibly sad. And a multitude of other things.

And of course, all of this brings back the feelings I had about Sybil's death. I still miss her, and think about her often. It also brings back memories about my first experience having someone close to me die, my Geometry teacher. Before that, the only person I'd lost was my grandfather, but I was never close to him. I was ten years old, and all I felt was a small bit of the magnitude of that ultimate realization, "Wow, people die." Seeing my mom so upset was hard, but that's where my personal connection to it ended. If anything, I felt further convinced that only old people die, and only at the end of their long, fulfilled lives. That was a hard conviction to have shattered when my teacher died five years later. He just had an aneurysm in his brain one morning on the way to school and died instantly. That will fuck with you if you think about it too long, especially when you're only fifteen.

Well, this is a rather depressing tour down memory lane. Sorry about that. I'm just caught up in all these thoughts lately, and it helps to write it out...

It seriously feels like weeks since I found out about M. instead of days. A million emotions and thoughts come up when people close to me die. Lately, I just find myself thinking, "Thank you," a lot, as I look around at my own life, and I just send that out to the universe, the big "I don't know" that may or may not be out there. And just in case someone's listening, I think about everyone I love and add, "Please, please, no one else die."