Experiences we could live without

I experienced a great tragedy in my family this week.  My seventeen year old cousin, Marinda,  was killed in a car accident on the 25th.  It makes you think of all kinds of stuff to put it off on, Karma, God, destiny whatever you can blame it on to make it easier to deal with all the pain that is tearing at your tender spot.  I was just thinking about precious human birth last week.  This week the second reminder came crashing in, death.  I think the contemplation goes:

But death is real,
Comes without warning.
This body
Will be a corpse.

Pretty heavy, especially in a society that tries really hard to hide sickness and dying.  Interestingly enough the heart sutra came to the rescue, sorta.  The commentary that I was reading placed particular emphasis on interbeing.  Interbeing principle says that this body is full of water which was once a cloud which was once a river and so on.  The body was sustained by vegatables that were furtilized by clouds, dead plants, and even dead people.  According to the Heart Sutra, in this way all things are sustained by every other thing even the death of someone so young and beautiful.  Was Marinda lost then?  It really feels like it, but maybe she was a cloud once, a girl once, and will be a flower soon.  The wheel continues to turn, let us be mindful.