'TIL DEATH DO US PART...

     Someone I am trying to get to know had this to say recently when someone close to her died: "I am convinced that when someone you are close to dies, a part of that person then becomes a part of you."

     It makes me think she and I have fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. Another example before commenting on the original point was when she said she loved performing on stage because it was only in front of so many people that she felt she could finally be herself.
     I responded that I had felt oppositely; that one could only truly be themselves when alone. The very existence of another person causes you necessarily to react to that person and that reaction causes you to filter your thoughts and actions. The more people you are around, the more generic (in a sense) you become (and thus, less like yourself).
     She found my explanation rational even if she herself did not subscribe to the notion. It makes me feel she would respond similarly to my thoughts on the death of a person close to you.

     I wrote long ago about the death of someone I had barely known and how acutely I had felt it simply because her presence in my life was so limited. I had never written about how the death of someone I knew on far greater levels affects me and my perceptions of that kind of death.

     So no, I don't feel that when someone you are close to dies that they become a part of you. I feel instead like a part of me is lost...like my soul (my sense of self, my memories/experiences, etc.) has had a piece of itself forcibly removed leaving behind this sucking void, however tiny, which can never be refilled because there will never again be a piece exactly like the one taken to fill in what has been lost. Sure (to stick with the analogy), it could be covered either entirely or partially obstructed, but never completely. There will always be some kind of gap...some kind of hissing sound. Perhaps we die, if not felled by sickness or injury, when simply too much of ourselves has been lost and we surrender to despair.

     You might say I have a Tolkien-esque view of the human soul or perhaps a variation on that idea. For me, so long as a person is alive, their soul - their essence of being if you will - is an abstraction. It permeates all those things around them and all the lives they touch while alive. I guess you could say life is not so much defined by its presence, but by its absence. Life is nebulous. It is temporary. It is a chaos. It is a possibility.
     But death...death is far from abstract. It is concrete. It is a returning to the lifelessness whence you came. Existence is ultimately a loan and a loan which will be repaid.

     It is through death that the flow of existence is suddenly crystallized. Now that this individual has left this world, it puts an end to how they might have further influenced it. In some cases, like with painters, it's easy to see the crystallization. Their souls are crystallized in the paintings they have left behind and should a painting of theirs be lost, what remains of their existence is diminished and can never be replaced. For others, the objects remaining can be comparatively simple or even non-sequitur like.
    
     A person lives on in our memories until we too pass on, further taking from this world what little of them still remains.

     At least, that's how I see things...

The crystallization of a soul, fixing itself in those people and things which it had touched and created...or the shattering of the Shikon Jewel by Kagome in episode 2 of Inuyasha, I'm not sure which ;-)