Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere: Wake Up!

I've never really known death. I haven't lived with it. I haven't witnessed the suffering. I haven't breathed with the pain. I can't imagine the absence. I don't know how it feels at all.

My grandpa died when I was 8. My dad flew east to be there. A telephone in New York transferred his sniffles 3,000 miles west. He missed my brother's birthday. We spread the old man's ashes that summer in the Long Island Bay. I watched them twist and dip through the air to land and rest on the water. My brother's face was covered in gray. He yelled over the wind, "Grandpa's in my eye!"

I went to a funeral when I was 16 with an open casket. But Aunt Pat looked nothing like Aunt Pat. She'd never wear salmon-colored lipstick, or those silly brown shoes. She looked heavy and empty. I kneeled, and crossed myself backward before her body. I listened to Ben Harper's song "Forgiven" as I waited in the car. I prayed she saw me cry. I wanted her to know I cared. I wanted her to know that I didn't know a damn thing about death. I didn't know where her soul went; I only knew that she was gone.

And death made no apologies, asked no questions, followed no rules.

I'm trying to make sense of it, and I can't. I'm trying to figure out how to handle it, and I don't know how. I'm too old to ride on my parents' condolences. So I'm trying to follow some sort of etiquette, to say the right things to people facing this inevitable, when maybe there's nothing right to say.

The days they go and go, and the years are flying and I'm hurled back to 4 years old, lifting my dying dog up the steps, because he can't walk them alone. There's humility in this suffering. There's humility in watching your mother crumble to the floor, in seeing your father cry, and he tries to catch his breath, to tell us it'll be OK. It doesn't always end OK.

God, it's hard. And it's sobering.

Cause here I am, at the end of the quarter, wrapped up with deadlines, freaking out about this final, or finishing that paper, and this grade is critical to my future [HTML_REMOVED] can't you see that? And what am I supposed to get so-and-so for Christmas? He's so hard to shop for, and [HTML_REMOVED]

Just stop. Catch your breath.

Someone is fighting for their life out there.

Life is so fragile. And so beautiful. In the smoothness of the tabletop beneath your burning fingers, in the yellow moon, in the wet of rain, in sex, in drugs, in rock, in hip-hop, in the homemade chicken noodle soup, in the laughs that come from nowhere, even in the dirt tracks on cheap linoleum and peeling walls life is beautiful.

It's a privilege that I have the time to worry about a paper.

In my Tarot deck, the Death card represents the birth of something new, symbolizing the experience of rebirth and renewal and the cycles inherent in all of life. It's hard to see death as rebirth when I've always seen it as an end, as the coda, as the sum of it all, forcing me, unwillingly, to look back and think about what came before. It's hard to be positive when death is so completely derailing. But I'm trying, I'm trying really hard, to see it as a chance, as a creation of space or energy to make something new and unbelievably spectacular. 2006 is coming to a close. But as this year nears its end, another one begins. We get another chance. We have another year. We're alive. We're so lucky to be alive.

Columnist Riley Rant: rileyrant@thedaily.washington.edu.