Life's Greatest Gift

Eloquent and Descriptive Sadness



There's a small little cabin on the cold mountains of New Zealand. A little girl stands there squeezing the life of a red rose she carried from home. Her grip is as tight as life itself. The rose is already dead from the squeezing. The little girl just can't let go. Her tears are rolling down her young face like a waterfall would rush over the rocks. She drops the rose onto the grave of her mother. Ski accidents happen here all the time, but this was the only death. The little girl felt like that was just her luck. The little girl was in middle school, and this tragedy couldn't have come at a better time. When everything else was falling down around her she just added the death of her mother to the list. Why not? If one thing goes wrong; why not everything else?

The answer in this girl's head was death. Life's greatest gift for her was death. Life is cold for this girl. Optimism never helped and pessimism felt right. Realism was the more appropriate road, but who has time to be real anymore? Even if this girl was a realist, she'd be depressed still. Her dad always tried to take the "things can only get better" mentality but somehow it got worse. The girl assumed she was a puppet. Who was pulling the strings? She thought a demon was. It killed all her joy. It stole all life around her. It destroyed all hope. She knew as she knelt down on the cold ground that one day she would die. She wasn't afraid of death like I said before. I had never seen someone who welcomed it so warmly. She hated waking up. She cried and begged God every night to take her soul early so that she wouldn't look at her pocket knife with the same suicidal dreams. The closest she had ever come was to stepping in front of a car that luckily dodged her.

Her dad's ritual for remembering the death of his wife was a little different. He would take a knife and cut deep into his leg and watch the blood slip down his thigh and calf. I think it was to remind him of all the blood he saw in this brutal accident. He'd follow that with a shot of the hardest whiskey he could find. Alcohol washed away some of his pain but not all of it.

She was only thirteen and really felt like the rose that she dropped on the cold ground. The girl was lifeless and without hope of life. The rose was never going to get sunlight or water. Life is squeezing the breath out of her with every second she blinks. She looked over the mountain and realized how appropriate it was that her mom died here. It's cold, desolate environment mirrored her personality and her overall outlook on life now. Why would this story go on any longer if it is only growing worse for this girl?

I was drawn to her story just because I realized something about human nature. Sadness is easier to feel than joy these days. The last thing I remember seeing before I left on my plane was a blizzard brewing. I offered my help but the dad and the little girl just hugged and stared at me. I knew that they figured this was their final resting place. They wanted to die with each other where they had lost someone so important to them. I left and saw them swallowed up in the storm. The girl died instantly from the ice and debris but the dad would die a few hours later as he was just buried alive in the snow. In a way I felt happy, but I felt the deepest sorrow for them.