There are citizens of the Western and European cultures that look upon death as being a sad occasion and final. This is due in part to analyzing what a deceased may or may not have accomplished in their life. At other times, the sadness is also based on the fear, loneliness and unfinished relationships with the decease by those still living.

In the times of early jazz, musicians played upbeat music in a progression that was celebrative when someone passed. Wine was shared and the body was paraded in a funeral car around the neighborhood the deceased lived. Women of Muslim communities try to keep women separated, so as for them not shed tears around a dead person or in the presence of what is conceived as the dead person’s spirit or spiritual crossing. For most Eastern ways of life, death is perceived as a gateway to another form of life or even another life as another person. Life is considered to Buddhist for instance that a current life is simply one of many dependent on how the previous one was lived as to whether Karma will determine if it will be successful happy one or degraded.

No one alive knows the complete truth about what death may or may not be. Yet there seems to be a consensus that death is endless in one form or the other. One only dies once seems to be the most acceptable idea among humans. But does the human die in a life, once? The following poem is an excerpt taken from a longer piece and speech was written with the expression to not dispute the fact of death, to change one’s belief system or find reason for death or why death lives. It was written for the reader to reflect on if indeed death is only once and or final.

Death Lives was also re-released because of my personal connections with understanding the troubles Whitney Houston had to endure as a mate of an addict and a thriving artist. I have always felt a deep emotional connection both on a psychic and numeric realm to Whitney Houston. I could have been in her shoes in many ways, but chose not to in part due to being leery of the entertainment business. These poem is from me to you who have recently lost loved ones and feel a heavy heart because you miss the physical connection of their beings. May it help with your heavy heart be lifted for a moment and help you reflect on the fact that when a spirit you have been close to lifts out of the body, it is as close to you as your own breath. Feel free to comment.

DEATH LIVES

How can this be that terror be upon your heart

when it is only the spirit that shall escape in a moment?

Fear shall you the day that death greets you hello

when it is only a new home being prepared for you why it is sent?

Cry? Why?

Have you not realized or perhaps you forgot

that you have done this thing already

in the womb of your mother?

Ahh yes

Now in a wink you think

Indeed you begin to understand to discover

what it may represent death

what it may uncover

There is no life in it like another

In a flash it is gone

No it does not prolong

In it there is life

Indeed-

Death Lives

copyright  Sharon L. West 1999  MightyDreamer Productions

http://authspot.com/poetry/death-lives/

Pictures of Whitney's Funeral Day (45) CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/2300-207_162-10011373-01.html?tag=page;next
© 2012 Sharon L. West