death

Once in a while, the universe has a funny way of creating events that lead your trail of thought seemlessly throughout the day. Yesterday was one of those days. One of my new goals is to use my new running shoes four times a week. On my second day, I was "running" south of campus before class. I dropped my keys, and as I bent back up, a procession of at least 15 cars (the first two black hearses) drove past me down 1st north. It's an odd sight in Provo, seeing as about 70% of its residents are young college students. It made me start thinking about my own funeral (grim, huh?). Will I lead the kind of life that, at the end, 15 cars worth of people want to come pay me respects? I always think it's sad when people live their whole lives, fulfilled or not, and people don't even care enough to go to their funeral. After a few minutes, my mind wandered to other subjects and I went on with the rest of my day.
Then I ran into my friend Len at lunch time. We got into a discussion about what a person does when their spouse dies. If it's a woman whose husband dies early, and she finds a new man with whom she falls deeply in love with, maybe even more so than the first husband, what does she do in heaven? Does she stay with the man she was sealed to, or does God do some switch-up thing after the fact? What if a person dies, leaves their spouse on earth, and finds a new companion in heaven? Does he stay with both women? There are so many scenarios, all of them just as confusing as the last. Len and I couldn't come up with any concrete answers to our musings, so we just ended the conversation saying that we hoped we would die close to our spouses so none of that confusion would go on.
I can't imagine the deep sorrow that exists when someone loses the person closest to them in this life. I think it would be one of those things that breaks me down. I have been blessed enough to not experience much of this in my life. But when it did happen, I was deeply affected. But I wasn't that far up on the list. When my Tata died, I couldn't fathom how my Mata, her children, or their spouses who knew him much longer than I did, felt.
My prayer is that anyone who has experienced the death of a close loved one has found comfort in healing power of the Savior's love and the fact that they can one day be reunited with them.
Matt swears he already called dibs on dying first so that he doesn't have to live without me. We always jokingly fight about who will die first. But the best case scenario, in my mind, would be like the scene in The Notebook. Two people live their lives together and die peacefully together in their sleep.
Anyway, I think death can be really morbid for a lot of people. It can be a comfort to someone watching a loved one suffer, or an avoided taboo subject. To me, death will hopefully be the ending to a well-lived life, full of joy, hard work, good memories, and the accomplishment of dreams.