Here today, and then tomorrow someone else is furnishing ceremonial arrangements to mark the passing of your existence.

It’s so cut and dry, especially when you consider the depths of a human’s emotional complexity. I’ll even go as far as to say that such a rite is inappropriately handled- but I don’t know what an alternate scenario should look like. None of us want to spend any more time than absolutely necessary pondering the finer points of a funeral.

When you’re a kid, you unwittingly take on this unsubstantiated perception that adults possess advanced coping mechanisms that can be called upon in times of adversity. I vividly remember a moment at age twelve where I was completely shattered by the death of a friend who drowned in our neighborhood pond. The funeral felt like a bad dream, and it took a long time for me to not think about the boy without tearing up. I remember seeing his mom at a memorial dance held in his honor, and at the party she had brought along a scrapbook of photos from his short life.

“Look at you all,” she said as her eyes shone with happiness in scanning the 80s-tinged memories, “you were such great kids.” As I looked down at the younger us all decked out in Halloween costumes, the searing pain of loss still thumped in my heart as I battled to fight back tears. His mother, on the other hand- this lady with an only son who was ripped away from life under tragic circumstances- she was squarely facing these powerful memories with only grace and love.

When I get older, I thought, surely I’ll be able to handle such tough moments with the same modicum of composure. It must be an adult-acquired skill.

Fast forward to over two decades later, and I am disillusioned to discover that my coping skills seem no better than those that I navigated as a twelve year-old girl. Bad news has no sense of decency or decorum- it slides in and hits you when you are least prepared, and often when you find yourself occupying surroundings that are unaccommodating to grief.

I sit here at my work cubicle amongst a sea of fellow drone bees who move about in an open office environment that fosters inclusiveness. I listen to incongruent words of bad news coming out of my phone’s earpiece and I am immediately cross-comparing them with the military uniform that is covering my body. They are two states of being that seem mutually exclusive, but they have come together with jarring dissonance anyway because that’s how life is. Nothing fits neatly into a box- and even if you thought it did at the outset, there’s no rule saying that these goblins of different stripes will stay put or even play nicely within their predetermined four walls of existence.

The strength of my supposed military bearing is no match against the tidal wave of emotions that is pressing down against my perfectly measured world.

I have no words to adequately express the Tilt-A-Whirl of sentiment that spins around inside of me after learning about the passing of a loved one. Shock. More shock. Trying to process. Tears. Anger. More shock. Trying to get a hold of yourself because this is neither the time nor the place to deal with such issues. The reflex to push down these feelings only gives them greater power. More tears. Run to a bathroom and stand stupid within one of the stalls as you stare at high-gloss paint that coats the cinder block walls as you try to reconform to this worktime setting.

Get a hold of yourself. You haven’t even seen her in what feels like ages. Suddenly, the realization of many years of time come and gone makes you feel like an asshole. Is this how we interact with family? Should I be feeling this sad when as of late I have only enjoyed passing contact via social media? Yes. She was a bright soul that offered nothing but love, sunshine, Cyndi Lauper and acceptance to you and your siblings over many holidays spent in New England. It is wrong that she has been taken from this world this soon. It is unfair.

All of these thoughts zip through my brain at a clip that can scarcely be registered. I feel like my head is detached from my wobbly body. And then I think to myself: I’m a 35 year old adult, and surely I should be handing all of this with greater aplomb.

And so there it is, the great deception of life: nothing gets easier to deal with or becomes less vague once you graduate from the halls of young insouciance. Maybe we just get a bit better at shuffling around our periods of emotional tribulation, but at the end of the day we are still no better equipped to process and dispose of our feelings. In the case of loss, it just so happens that it is the most insurmountable of feelings, and its power will always trump any time or circumstance that you happen to occupy upon intersection.

Sad. Shock. Anger. Sad. The loop goes on as I sit here and continue to field all of the requests coming in from co-workers who stop by my cubicle and need something. Almost no one is catching on to my disarray, as best as I can tell. Probably better that way too, seeing as how anything more than a superficial observance of my new-found reality will cause the whole façade to come tumbling down.

Little kids are unmasked in expressing their grief, and they look to us big kids to make sense of a world that is changing around them. As I sit here now and experience the same forcing of circumstance, I know that there is no one in my world  who will have a better handle on this tragedy. The only difference between me at 12 and me now at 35 is that I finally understand that life can be random- and cruel- and it has absolutely no regard for how you’ve constructed your world and familial configuration.

It’s times like right now where I wish that I could go back to being a kid and blindly believe that some day I will be faced with these moments and they will truly become easy.