Death is often an uncomfortable subject. We avoid it and we shy away from those who have lost someone. Especially when we are young it seems as if we have eternity and when someone does die it is shocking and an unspeakable subject. Disease is ugly. It is something to be beaten, not a part of living. Death, however, is an incredibly powerful and important part of life.

Only in recent years did I accept how greatly death has shaped my life, specifically the death of my grandmother. I knew that we cannot live forever but the concept of death was never something I had directly had an experience with until September 22, 2008. Lung cancer had worn away at my grandmother's body for years, slowly eating away at her.

This list is nowhere near comprehensive however it does attempt to capture my experience with death and how it has impacted my life and my understanding of what it means to come to terms with death.

1. Live every day like it is the last

This one in particular may seem incredibly cliche however I think it is the one lesson my grandmother would have wanted me to remember. We talked on the phone every holiday, birthday and many weeks in between. Calls increased as she grew sicker, and still every single time she still managed to remind me to live every day to its fullest. She knew, in being at the end of her life, that every day matters and that there were not that many more days to live.

I never understood the meaning and power of this until several days before her death. We had flown out to be with her in the last days of her life. My mother went in with my father to see her and say goodbye. While several of my cousins and I waited outside, my littlest cousin asked, “when is Nana coming out?” Right there I understood that she really would never come out again, she would never again feel the sun and see the faces of her grandchildren.

I began to realize that when she always said to live every day as if it were your last doesn't necessarily mean trying to do the great and amazing every day, but to enjoying even the little tasks in life and being fully present in every conversation and activity.

2. Love can be so incredibly strong

Watching someone you once knew as so independent and strong degenerate is even harder that the actual act of dying. This was less evident in the death of my grandmother because when she was at her weakest and sickest my parents kept us from seeing her. However, weakness was very evident in every phone call and in every visit and this alone was enough to hurt me more than the moment she died.

This process became even more real in the death of my grandfather two years ago. He died very slowly of Lewy body disease (LBD). My grandparents lived a lot closer so we saw them often and the slow loss of memory and ability to control his own body was one of the hardest things to watch. I sat with him in front of the television, several months before he died, and from what little words I could understand it was evident that he really thought we were at a Cubs game back in Chicago.

My grandmother loved him and cared for him until the very end. Even though it took an incredible toll on her, his life to her meant so much more than the burden he was becoming. At the very end, even though he didn’t really recognize or talk to me, it is the times when he was strong and when he would talk about geology or the news for hours on end which I will remember him for. And even though much of what makes us human was no longer evident in him, the family loved him through all of the mess and ugly, just as it was with my grandmother.

This one is so difficult because a process like this affects the lives of the living to the core and it is incredibly ugly to watch. In most stories which I have experienced, heard or read about love strains but love is also why we walk with these people through this ghastly process to the very end.

3. Even the strongest people we know will die

Every single person is in one way or another dying. There is literally 100% chance that each and every human will die. When it is put this way it sounds pretty depressing, but really it has reminded me of that first realization, that while we are here, every day means something because we do not have an infinite amount of time.

My grandmother was a role model for me from a very young age. She was a very strong woman who lived by herself for many years and as a kid I always looked up to her as the strongest person I knew. She was not only strong emotionally and personally but also physically. I wanted to be just like her. And before she was diagnosed I truly thought she would always be there. It wasn’t until many years after her death that I realized she would always be there but could never live forever.

4. We mark our lives by deaths of those we love

Why is this? Why is it that such events, which we can barely talk about, become such defining points in our lives?

Not only is death such a crucial event in life, but how we come into the world is just as paramount. This I realized just this semester when my professor started his very first lecture with the statement, “We mark our lives by births and deaths.” The important events in a person’s life are often one of those occurrences.

I've thought back through the years since my grandmother's death and realized just how accurate this is. 2008 is the year she died, and I often refer to the years going from middle into high school as the time she had cancer and the time of her death.

I suppose a reason for this is that death is something most people fear throughout life. Many people theorize, yet we are still truly afraid because we cannot know what will happen when the lights go out for the last time. We literally have no idea what will ensue. Or maybe we fear because we fear the darkness of it, that there will be no light at the end. In living through the deaths of others we can never hear or see them alive again and that is incredibly scary, especially when they have played such major roles in our lives.