We've all got to go sometime...

Death is a funny thing, something that I never really felt one way or the other about. I've had deaths in the family, been exposed to deaths on TV and in the newspaper, had health scares with people I love...but I've always maintained a fairly positive outlook on life.

I realize that we could all be gone in a moment's notice. Randomly, unknowingly, and certainly unwillingly deceased by simply going to the grocery store, or the bank, or even by doing nothing at all. Our bodies are ticking time bombs it seems, but it's just something I've come to accept and not obsess over.

But it's hard not to take a harder look when another person dies that shouldn't.

In this case, it was a bank teller named Nicole. She worked at the branch in the town where I went to High School, and was a singularily wonderful person. She had the greatest smile, best attitude, and generally healthiest lifestyle of so many people that came and went through the doors. She was 52 when she died last week from lung cancer.

Now, Nicole never smoked. She was an avid cyclist, worked out nearly constantly, and took great care of her body. My mother and her were very friendly on professional terms; it's hard not to be when you've been going to the same bank and the same teller for 20 years. I remember last summer, sitting in Tim Horntons (coffee shop chain) with a friend, and Nicole walking through the door, fully dressed in cycling outfit, with a handsome man with her.

That man was her new boyfriend. After being divorced only a few years before, she'd met her new beau through a fitness contact, and the rest was history. That man had also just married her a few weeks before her death.

I was pretty shook up about Nicole being gone. After all, us youngins are being told to expect to live well into our 80's, if not longer thanks to new medical technologies. But it just seems to happen that these things still occur, that the wrong person drops dead from a disease they never should have had.

When I think about death, I don't dwell on it. But I don't dismiss it, no matter how convenient ignorance might be. I don't want to die, but if my number comes up I guess I don't have much choice. What scares me more is that someone else I know and love might be next, and I'm not ready to loose anyone just quite yet.

We have no choice of who stays and who goes. Sure, our lifestyle dictates some things, but on the overall we don't choose to make ourselves targets. I shudder to think that my friend may be run over on the way to class, or my father drop dead of a heart attack, or my mother's cancer return and spread through her body...

I'm not being morbid here. My point is simple, and probably already well understood by so many people. Cherish life, your friends, your family. Enjoy every second, no matter how mundane or simple it might be. Even if you do this subconsciously, at least tell yourself once a day to remember your dreams and desires for tomorrow. And never let go of your memories.

Goodbye Nicole, where-ever you are.