At The End
By: Juanita Gonzalez
10 A
They say at the very end of our lives, when we are standing on the verge of death, everything clarifies, our lives pass in front of us like a movie of love, passion, tragedy, and sadness, as the story of someone who lived and now will die. It's during that spark of wisdom that death kindly gives us, that our greatest desires, the person who we love the most come to our mind to take away our final breath, our final thoughts, those remarkable last words that can be simple or complex, but will always be meaningful.
Life has proven to be unpredictable, day by day, we live knowing that death will always be our fate, that someday our heartbeat will stop, our lungs will no longer fill with air, our brains will stop thinking, and we will seize to live. Yet we keep delaying things, retaining words in our mind, feelings stuck in the deepest part of our heart, we keep saying I'll do it tomorrow, knowing that tomorrow might not even exist. It all comes to that moment when we can’t delay things anymore because then, the word unsaid will remain unsaid forever, the feeling untold will never be recognized, and the stories we have to tell will die with us.
On a tragic Tuesday not so long ago, our world filled with grief, filled with a collective heartache that nowadays we still carry with us. That particular Tuesday, 19 terrorists managed to end with about 2996 lives, managed to write the last chapter of not just persons, but parents, daughters, sons, friends, of loved ones, in a cold-blooded act. There are lots of heartbreaking scenarios in our world, poverty, illness, suicide, but believe me when I say that there is nothing that makes my soul tremble, my voice to break, and my spirit to go down as the last words of people that were ambushed by death on 9/11 of 2001. Hearing those audios of angst, of sadness, of people trying to mumble their feelings in few words, saying I love you, I'm sorry, I call to say goodbye, show us everything wrong with the world, show us the unfairness but also the love and the passion that life has.
Life is fragile. We don't need any more proof to know that we can never be sure of anything, we can never be sure of tomorrow, or of our future. We couldn't have known about the terrorist attack on 9/11 in 2001. We couldn't have known that so many lives would end and that several last words would have been said that day. So, in memory of those who lost their voice, their capability of feeling, to those who lost the chance to hug their family goodbye and kiss their lover's goodbye, we owe them the fact that we must live like there's no tomorrow. To shout to the rooftops, that we are alive, that we love, to remember them by savoring every bitter and sweet moment of life. We have the potential to live fully, don't waste it, don't let it go, embrace it, appreciate every instant, the bad ones and good ones, smile, and cry if you want but don't ever waste time. There's no right moment, now is all you got. Are you going to exist and just breathe, or live like life is a gift?