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The original column, published on May 15th, 2019 can be found below

Do you remember? Do you recall? Do you remember? 'Cause I remember it all.

So over now. It's so over now. So over now. It's so over now.

I've been thinking about grief a lot lately. Way more than I should, that's for sure. A lot of it centered around death, but not in a way that I'm used to. So if you don't want to read any thoughts on death right now, feel free to hop out here.

I've always been pretty good at compartmentalizing the "celebrate their lives rather than mourn their deaths" kind of grieving and often end up being the first one to crack some dumb joke and try to make people smile again. Not that I don't get depressed about it, too, that's just not where I really find my grief. Mine usually comes more from the realization that the end of someone's story is some random, arbitrary jumping off point, and knowing that I'll never be ready for it.

Rolling on the grass, some things never last

Just stay for a while, we could have a blast

How can I go on without you now?

How can I live without you when you have become my everything?

Maybe we'll have an accident.

You are my everything. The song that I might sing

You are my everything

I was thinking a lot about this even before I picked up the final Cranberries album, In The End, but this record certainly drove it home for me.I've had a passing fondness for The Cranberries for a long time, but nothing deeper than remembering how good "Zombies" was in 1994. But right around the time this album came out, the podcast Song Exploder had an episode about the opening track, "All Over Now" and I immediately ran out and bought a copy. If you're not up to date with The Cranberries, the singer, Dolores O'Riordan, passed away very unexpectedly last year, while they were still working on demos for In The End. After sitting on it for a while, the remaining band members decided to return to the studio with Dolores' vocal demos and finish the record in her honor. I'm not sure how somber the original demos were, but the album's a heartbreaking goodbye to Dolores, but with a healthy dose of optimistic self-reflection that really helped me sort through a lot of the grief I'd been focusing on lately.

Maybe it's just that I'm getting older and a lot of the older artists I grew up following are starting to pass away more frequently. Maybe I'm just melodramatic and looking for an escape from all of my anger at the world. There's a lot of reasons I've fallen into this cycle lately, but I'd like to focus on some of the more trivial ones, especially since I don't really feel that it's my place to project and discuss other peoples' losses or grief. Recently, my favorite comic book character was killed off in a pretty... I'll say problematic way. But I realized that I was way more angry about the way the book discussed and further stigmatized trauma and mental illness than about the fanboy complaints I had and it didn't affect me in any of the ways I expected it to. After thinking on it for a while, I started to really re-evaluate how I viewed death, both as a narrative device and then in my own life. Because real death, unlike in fiction, is so random, I think we too often put too much weight on it. It's just a moment, same as any other moment, in a person's story and I don't think it's fair to belittle all the other moments that made up their lives, just to focus on the one where they weren't any longer. By putting all of our sadness and focus on that single moment, it reduces an entire person to one thing. A monolith of regrets, unexperiences, wasted potential, emptiness. And I hate that. No matter who it was, I can guarantee they were way more than that. A story's end o