This is a pretty personal note on an incident that just happened recently: My uncle died, and although he wasn’t that close to me and my grief has its frontiers, it has a couple of implications about my own finiteness of life.

First of all, I am in a current state of reevaluating and restructuring (again), and in this course I have to endure phases of being tired, overwhelmed, angry, depressed and all that jazz. I have learned to deal with these phases and I have learned that these phases are common in the first year of sobriety.

I have some challenging phases at work, which I can deal with very fine, since my self efficacy expectation works as a resilience charging device and I can use this as a very efficient buffer.

For my private life, I am still balancing sports, indulging in Cosmic Horror, family and my other hobbies, which at times come close to “habit building madness”. I’ve been there before, and I can deal with it.

All together, however, puts my resilience, my resources and (sometimes even) my Recovery.

I try to see it as a process of moulting in some sense. There needs to be a bottle neck I have to squeeze through, building up friction and upon release, everything seems easier.

Interestingly, the death of my uncle first made me think of this process becoming even harder:

It opens an open flank; it is not the outright feeling of being “the uppermost oldest generation” with open end (in terms of: my parents are still the “roof generation” in my family). But this roof is getting leaky of sorts: My parents get old themselves, they start showing signs of geriatric illnesses signifying that their lifespan is coming to an end. The death of my uncle doesn’t open the roof. But it opens the flank so the whole construction gets leaky.

I mean that in the sense that I won’t get around dealing with my own age and my mortality anymore.

I don’t mean to say that I am starting to count my remaining days or that I am getting an age-depression of midlife crisis (been there, know what that feels like).

I mean that I could die at the age of 50, 60, 80 or I could get ancient, a hundred or whatever imagination holds.

I mean that the prospect of a finite life could send wave upon wave of depression, anxiety and despair over me – But it doesn’t.

The whole journey of my Recovery, with all its ups and downs, and the outright test of my resilience and self image that I am going through right now, crowned by the death of my uncle showed me one thing today:

I have established a system in which the evaluation of my life, especially the meaning of my life and the inevitable end of it doesn’t mean a void or oblivion and absolute darkness. I have my belief system that is closely related to a pantheistic view based on Spinoza and maybe even a philosophy based on Cosmic Horror, but stripped of the maddening and evil aspects of it.

And this system, this belief in a meaningful existence in the large expanse of the universe put into context of re-evaluating my own mortality after the death of my uncle for the first time gave me a very positive view on enjoying life as it is and giving myself the permission to learn to deal with death without anxiety.

I don’t know if that does make any sense to you as a reader, but it does for me. And that is very comforting and gives me solace.

Until next time, keep up the faith in yourself and take one step at a time.

PS: Yes, I have allowed myself to shed a few tears and that was a wonderful feeling.