is that a negativity vortex around those ashes?

J's ashes are separated into several urns. One of them is a small heart-shaped container, actually, it's a heart-shaped bracelet inside a metal box of the same shape. When we were at the funeral home it seemed like a pacifying idea to wear some of his ashes around my neck. When the bracelet was handed to me, however, I felt differently. I thought it to be morbid somehow. Me! The queen of morbid (amongst my friends, that is).

I don't know if I told the story already, when I realized that the funeral home I had chosen turned out to be led by a guy who had been in rehab with J upstate once. They were friends, but he didn't realize that connection either until J's body arrived from the morgue. And so - because I had asked to split the ashes in order to give a part to J's mom and have his ex-wife hold some for his daughter - the funeral director showed his sympathy with real generosity. Not only did we get a much cheaper price for the service and everything but he also gave us several small urns and three bracelets (one for me, one for his mom, and one for his daughter).

Because it has been so bad lately, I decided to take this heart-shaped container to bed with me yesterday. And somehow this desperation must have triggered a dream of J. This dream didn't seem like a happy visit as usual, it seemed like a bad memory. I was reminded of how low in life he was while we were together. How many of his clothes were too big for him because he got them from a homeless shelter. How he struggled with addiction. We tend to forget the raw, frustrating dailies when someone leaves this world.

When I woke up, I thought, maybe his ashes are just a remainder of his physical self here and shouldn't be seen as anything else. Nothing that is really him and, if anything, possibly fostering bad energy, for in this life, and in this body he was in constant pain. He wasn't made for this world, I once heard someone say about him. Sometimes I feel that's true. He suffered under his mundane existence. It didn't fit in with the injustice and death of this world. He felt privileged and that the only reason worth living was to make a change in this world. He could barely wrap his head around the "posh" conditions of an average, modern, western-industrialized life. Even when he was homeless he had internet access, drank the occasional cup of Starbucks coffee, and had access to the resources of his alma mater (Columbia University). He felt privileged and unjustly so. I can relate to that. I feel the same way, although, I translate this feeling into deep gratitude of my seemingly random placement in this world.

Today, I wondered whether my suffering would be less intense if I lived in a war zone. If I lived in a war zone, all my peers would have suffered similar losses, my whole reality would be shaped by devastation and loss and I would have to adapt and provide for daily survival ...together with all my fellow war zone inhabitants. Clearly, this is a very naive and abstract theory - but, if you think about it, if your closest person dies tomorrow, who can really relate to you? It is utterly isolating to lose someone to death, worse - sudden, unexpected death. Nobody can relate until it happens to them. I couldn't relate until it happened to me. Like with everything else that's unusually tough in our lives.

Earlier, I found myself in the room where the biggest part of J's ashes are stored. It's a strange, triangular shaped, beat-up metal container I found in the second-hand shop across from the building he lost his life in. It reminded me of him and I decided on it as a perfect urn. I don't even know what purpose this thing served before. It seemed as if it had been made for exactly this.
I kneeled on the floor and touched the urn, lowering my head, closing my eyes and then I felt the negativity. It's as if I was told that this is not where and what he is anymore. To think of him differently. That this container and the ashes inside are a bad memory and that he is now in a good place, not tied to our physical world.

As with most epiphanies I have, I always wonder if it's being given to me or if it is just me.

One - very non-ephiphanical (.. wait, that's really a word? I don't see any auto-correct telling me I'm orthographically challenged) ... ok, .. if it isn't a word, I'm making it one. One - very non-epiphanical moment I had ...also today... was the thought about this saying "all will be known in the end". What if I don't want to wait anymore? Why can't we just know now? I'm tired. I'm getting old (almost 40!). The 50-year-olds are probably chuckling now. I feel old, anyway. Like, I've lived enough. I would like to know it all. now.