I can't understand how somebody so vibrant and alive can suddenly be dead. It doesn't make sense to me. To have so many people who love you and whom you love back just ripped away from you like that. It seems so lonely. I've always been skeptical of the idea of heaven but I don't want to think that she, as a person, is completely gone. It depresses the hell out of me.
I don't understand why it is that some people have to go through so much shit, cancer of all things, for four fucking years and then die, while my worst days aren't even that bad. If there is a God, if He kills off some people because He wants them with Him in Heaven, then why the hell does He force them to suffer so much? If He loves them enough to kill them so they can be with Him, why doesn't He make it so that they die peacefully? If He loves everybody, like everyone says He does, then why does He only put some people through hell while others get off almost scott-free? If it's some sort of test, shouldn't He make everyone go through it, not just random people who did absolutely nothing to deserve it?
And if God isn't real or if the real God is nothing like what we imagine then we have to accept the fact that people die and then they stay dead and there's no comfort except that they're an eternal cocoon of ignorance where at least nothing can hurt them anymore. But that's not comforting enough. You don't say to their family, "Well, at least she's gone and buried in a graveyard now," as if that's supposed to make them feel better. You tell them that she's in heaven or that she's happy because you can't bear to think of the possibility that she might actually be gone. It's an awful image but I can't stop imagining her shivering, pale and skinny, in a coffin somewhere. I hope they give her a blanket or something. Even that would be better than nothing.
That I feel her loss so strongly, even though I've never met her or even talked to her, that makes me feel like she isn't really gone. I've never cared so much when someone died before. A lot of my grandmother's friends have died, people who I saw every summer when I visited her in England, people who were lovely and warm and like extended family, and I've never been so sad when they died. Because they were old and they had long, full lives and they had time. That I can't stop thinking about her, that I'm trying to imagine her complexly, makes me feel like she's still out there somewhere. It sounds stupid but I feel like she's had such an effect on me for a reason. Call it God, call it the cosmic forces, call it human psychology, but whatever it is, she has made me want to help people. I've always vaguely wanted to help people, but it was more of a nice sentiment. Now, no. I want to actually do something.
Like I've said before, I know that my sense of loss is nothing - nothing - compared to what her friends and family must be feeling. I can't imagine. I really can't imagine. I truly have nothing to compare it to. This had made me fear the inevitable, eventual loss of my family and friends and acquaintances so, so much more because if I can care this much about a person I don't know, how am I going to survive the other shit life dumps on us?
It's small things we had in common, just that we have the same middle name and I'm only two months older than her and we both love Nerdfighters and Harry Potter; relatively trivial things that hundreds of other people can also claim a connection to. But, all of that, the fact that she was in a vlogbrothers video, the fact that she had a sense of humor and an apparent optimism that I, I in a far better situation, could learn from-- it all just made me assume, somehow, that she was going to survive. I just figured, of course she's going to make it. She's going to make it and then we're going to have a celebration in a vlogbrothers video and then she's going to get her GED and go to college and do something awesome and continue to be awesome and everything is going to be great. And then. And then she didn't survive it. And fuck you, cancer, fuck you. Why did you attack her? What has she ever done to deserve it?
God, I'm tearing up again as I'm writing these words. Everything has made me cry. I haven't sobbed like I'm sure her friends and family have. I've just been tearing up and not fighting the tears as they come, periodically, as if everything Esther-related is a key in the lock, every time I watch a video related to her. Alex Carpenter's song is the most beautiful thing I've heard in a long time. Cry cry cry. God. I don't even know.
I miss you, Esther. I don't know you, but I miss you.
Thomas Edison's last words were it's very beautiful over there
I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere
And I hope it's beautiful, like you
You're beautiful, I never really knew you at all
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