Missing Hannah

It's inevitable, I'm going to miss Hannah more when special occasions come up. I'm turning 29, and Hannah is still 25.

Different revelations have come to me at different times. When I first sat with her body at the hospital, it seemed so clear to me: there is nothing after this life. Hannah's lifeless body communicated one thing to me: there is no afterlife, nowhere we are going after this. I felt I had deluded myself after Papa's death into believing that he was watching over me from somewhere else, and suddenly, I knew that wasn't true.

But I still have a strong belief in the existence of the soul. What separated Hannah from being alive one moment and dead forever the next? It seemed to me that her soul was there, and then it left, and that was what made all the difference. As I explained to a friend, if her body had seemed destroyed, that would have explained it. But it didn't - she seemed as beautiful as ever, just tragically frozen.

I'm starting to think that life is supremely random. It's not that Hannah was "meant" to die, or that there was a cosmic mistake that allowed her to die despite other plans for her. She just died through the confluence of tiny events and decisions. For some reason, this makes me believe that we must not cling too steadfastly to anything external. Not that we shouldn't have goals and reams - I don't believe we can survive the heartbreaks of life without our aspirations. But we must thrive in the moment and not rely upon something we think we deserve coming to us in the future.