Dear Death,

I honestly don't know the first time I met you. As a military brat, it's an occupational hazard: peoples' mommies and daddies leave and never come back. You don't always understand why. But I can tell you exactly the first time I feared you--I couldn't have been more than five. Dad was overseas, and I sat listening to my fan whirling above my head, a constant lullaby as I cried myself to sleep, wondering what a bullet feels like crashing into my skin.

I had the same dream every night for a year. I was Dad, fighting the bad guys, dying. Bullets mortally wounding me in different places. Over and over and over. It was a vicious cycle. I would die, wake up, cry, sleep, and die again. Every single night you haunted me, and every single night, I kept asking the same question: who would keep me safe from the boogie monsters if my dad couldn't?

You never answered me. You just laughed. You have a strange way of leaving behind more questions than answers. I finally understood that when I was nine, standing in the middle of white tombstones, singing It Is Well as we laid my best friend in the grave. The casket was beautiful, silver and white with flowers adorned. I wondered why we used something so ornate to cover up the horror her void left in the world. You said nothing; you just celebrated as her body was covered by dirt, never to be seen again.

I forgot about you for a while, ignoring the gaping holes you left in my heart. Knowing that if I thought of you, tragedy would surely follow. It followed anyway. Apparently, death has no respect for the elderly. You snatched him up without a moment's notice. A week of illness is not long enough to prepare yourself for a void left so gapingly in your life.

It's not right, you know, and it's not fair. I'm not ready to hear guns ring in mourning. I'm not ready to open my mailbox expecting a letter I know will never come. But this, this is the lot you cast for me. This is the lot I must bare.

You give no answers: only questions, and only pain. People tell me that he's in a better place right now, and he wouldn't want me to mourn, but I'm not sure I believe them. He might be in a better place, but he left the world worse off, and missing someone is the highest form of military love. We only miss those who have so severely impacted our lives that we cannot truly see without them. Mourning extends that missing into the deepest form of honor. It allows us a moment in which we cannot see the future, and we can behold the past--a luxury that is often stolen from us.

I hope you know how much you've changed me, Death, and I hope you know I wish I could cripple you with a vengeance. But I can't, so despite everyone's best intentions, I'll do the next best, and grieve.

But, please, stop, if only so I can move on.

Your Incomplete Adversary