Long ago, when I was still in kindergarten, I had my girlfriend Anya (Anna), who lived not too far from my grandmother's house. I often ran to her house, knocked on the door and asked "Anya will come out?" when her parents opened door to me. The adults were touched, looking at our childishly innocent friendship, and jokingly called us the bride and groom. But one day my relatives made some particularly gloomy faces and said that Anya will not come out any more, because "she crashed in an accident and died."
- What does it mean that she died? I asked, still not understanding anything.
"She is gone. What can you not understand?" my grandmother answered irritably.
Not having understood her explanations, but having felt something wrong, I immediately ran to the Anya's house and began to knock on the heavy iron door.
-Anya will come out? - I asked a question to her father when he opened it to me.
This man did not answer me, but just shut the door right in front of my face. So I first encountered death, losing my best friend. May her soul rest in peace.
A few years later, it suddenly occurred to me that people are mortal and all of them, including me, will sooner or later cease to exist. From the realization of this fact, I just stood in the middle of the room and began to cry in my voice.
-I do not want to die! - I cried, without even trying to wipe my tears.
"You will not die" my mother tried to lie to me, but I knew that she was not telling the truth.
At the age of ten she was the first to tell me about the death of a boy who lived in our house a floor above.
-Get in a whirlpool with his father and drowned. Both were fine swimmers.
Well, okay. So he will no longer be in my life. I felt neither sorrow nor regret, and five minutes later I forgot about the existence of that boy, although we used to often cross in the courtyard with him. From that moment on, I began to treat death more calmly.
Later on, other relatives died, and my reaction to their death was exactly the same, except for the death of my aunt (my father's sister), who, although she made many mistakes, did not deserve to die at such a young age. So I grew up rather insensitive in everything that concerns the death of others. This helped me cope with the losses of my dogs, which I loved very much. Death is an inevitable stage in the life of every being, therefore it should be taken with humility and stoicism.
