A ten year old lies in bed, hugging his teddy bear after a hard day, and wondering why it doesn't bring him the comfort it once did. He realizes he can never go back to the child he was.
A teenager has his sexual innocence stripped away by a stranger called puberty. He misses the simple joy of imagination, of action figures and make believe and five foot walls being castles, but at least he has new toys to play with.
In middle age he loses his appetite. He is dead now, but still living to witness his lost self somewhere back in the folds of time.
A girl falls in love, gets married, has children. She gets to be a mother. The mother who would have been ages past menopause, and that identity is forever shut off from her. She's never to be a mom.
Everybody dies everyday, their identity stripped away by ceaseless time and our hormonal fates. There's the person we were behind us, and we can never be them again. We can never again feel the ecstasies we have already lost. Our new identity becomes one of acceptance, by necessity. Should I therefore not fear death, having died already? There's always something more to lose.
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