People die. People you love will die. YOU will one day die.

Not a revolutionary thought, nor overly insightful, yet something we tend to forget from day to day.

You can even be prepared for a death, and then when it actually happens, it totally catches you off guard.

Death, prepared or unprepared, is difficult.

I think the greatest thing to learn from the loss of life is how fleeting it all truly is. After the initial tears, I always feel very grateful to still have my breath, anxious to soak up the beauty this world has to offer and share with others. I suppose it wasn´t always like that, but with age comes wisdom, and death is one thing I´ve come to know very well in my nearly-27 years.

My Uncle Jan recently lost his battle to cancer. What a great man he was. What luck had I to have him as an uncle.

And as I sat so far from family and grieved, I must admit, I got to feeling pretty sorry for myself and guilty for placing so many miles between my lovely family and me.

We always seem to turn death into something about us. How it affects us. How it changes us. How unbearable it is for US. Death, for the most part, is about us. The one who died, they´re off to a better place or perhaps even no place at all, but this life is over for them; it is “us” who have to suffer.

To die “normally” is possibly the least selfish thing a human can do, it´s completely out of their hands. And it´s completely out of our hands.

We cannot change it, we can only accept it.

Death, prepared or unprepared, is difficult. So cry, try to find something good that comes from it and move on. The whole “woe is me” act will only take away precious time. After all, you still have your breath. You still have the opportunity to see pretty birds in Peru, monkeys in Costa Rica, hummingbirds on your parent´s back porch….