[Starman]

Does it seem like there have been a lot of deaths this year, may be especially among celebrities and those in the public eye, sort of like a changing of the guard. Or maybe its just the over-reporting of news outlets and having so many various sources from which so-called “news” can be received.

I think it is a good thing, even though I offer condolences of sadness and gratitude to their surviving loved ones. I think it is a good thing because maybe it will generate more public discussion in the U.S. about death. As a child back in the 1950’s when my grandmother died I was not allowed to attend her funeral because it was in the culture which I was raised that children did not attend funerals; something about preserving their innocence, etc.

I found how Debbie Reynolds died rather interesting, if not at first taken back, that she died within a day of her daughter, and both died from natural causes as far as is now known. Debbie Reynolds voiced that she missed her daughter and wanted to be with her, and shortly died after that. I do think there is a connection. It often happens that someone will die shortly after their spouse or other closely held loved one. My brother died shortly after my mother.

All of me and my siblings traveled the world except for my one brother who stayed living with my mother, taking care of her right up to her death, and then he died shortly thereafter. That these things coincide does not merely make them a coincidence. I firmly believe that the day and time of our death is preplanned and no one dies until they are suppose to die. But how will we truly know if this is correct or not. In human form, we probably will not.

Death is like the natural balancer of population growth on this planet. Imagine if no one ever died and yet there would constantly be continual births happening on this planet. Overpopulation would happen very quickly. Of course the other side of this is the caring for another persons journey, in this world and the next. Missed loved one, or tragic events that took someone closely held.

The hardest emotional thing involving death for me was watching children die, or having to carry a dead baby in my arms, which I did as a combat medic and later a civilian ambulance EMT. Watching an autopsy was the most potent external view of death I had ever seen. An watching a child or infant autopsied could be devastating to the senses. But this is done from a very objective scientific point of view and the physical human bodies are no longer considered “people” by most who work in a morgue or perform autopsies.

In death those who externally remain share wanting feelings about those who are no longer externally with us. Death, being the great transformer, is with us every day of our lives, with every breath which we take anticipating the next breath. In my opinion death is not a good or bad thing itself, death is but a natural dramatic transformation. But it does seem to me like there has been a lot of publicly announced deaths this year; most from generations past, many whom I grew up with, and I am grateful for the positive work which most developed, shared, and left behind. R.I.P. for those, all of those in the public eye or not, who passed in 2016.