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Jessica Henderson
English 111 YN1
October 24, 2008
After Life
My experience with the unthinkable wasn’t a good experience, which most aren’t
unthinkable experiences aren’t. These things always happen when you least expect it. I
had a pet that was close to our family. Actually she was part of our family and had an
awesome personality. One night she was alive, breathing and happy. The next morning
she was gone. She had fallen and strangles herself with her rope, during the middle of
the night or during the early morning we will never know. As with Didion at first the
concept doesn’t seem real. You think to yourself did that really just happen? Was I
dreaming? Then you realize you aren’t dreaming, then it hits you hard.
Ordinary instances are what make up our lives. If we didn’t have instances what
would our lives consist of? We have good and bad instances but the bad ones seem to
affect us most sometimes. Couples with thirty years of marriage get divorced, siblings or
parents pass away without even saying good bye. Those are the worst instances in my
eyes. Your heart fills with grief and anger and you begin to ponder on the “what if’s”.
“What if I would have helped give that person advice”, “what if I would have told them I
love than more that anything”, “What if I had been by her side a minute sooner”, would
she still have died? But we will never know because it all happens in an instant. Too fast
to respond.
You never know when it will happen or why and no one really has the answers to
how, when or why. You can’t anticipate those instances as in didions story. In the end she
had anticipated a different death for her husband, but we can’t know these things
already. If we could anticipate when bad things are going to happen, then we would all
stay at home and lock our doors, but as didion showed us we aren’t even safe in our own
homes. Death will always find us....