Death. We hear about it all the time. On the news, from a friend. We’re all bound to experience it at some point in our lives. But nothing truly prepares us for the emptiness death brings. It’s something you don’t understand until you experience it yourself.  Death is described in the Oxford dictionary as being “the action or fact of dying or being killed.” But death, I think, isn’t just about the physical act of dying. Death is the void left behind by a loss. Whether it be the loss of a loved one, or even of yourself.

In Khalil Gibran’s short poem “The Gravedigger”, Gibran describes a metaphorical situation in which he is “burying his past selves.” He is approached by a gravedigger, who expresses his fondness towards the narrator due to him “only com[ing] laughing and [leaving] laughing.” Death is something that everyone experiences in their life. While it is often met with grief and mourning, Gibran opts to view the experience in a positive light.

Gibran’s description of “burying his past selves” could be referring to him accepting the loss of his past self. As we grow and mature, our experiences shape who we are as a person. A lot of times, these experiences mean losing some of our innocence. Every time we are exposed to a new event or a  traumatic experience, we lose innocence. As we mature, we must learn to confront these experiences and accept them. Not only that, but we must keep a positive outlook on life, rather than letting our negative experiences poison our lives and make us cynical.  

Young children are usually more naive than adults due to lack of experience. They haven’t grown enough to know to be cautious or wary of others. They don’t know any better. Not all experiences are negative, obviously. There’s many positive events in which we can learn and grow. But, at least for me, the most growth comes from the ones that hurt. Experiences such as assault. It strips your innocence. It takes what isn’t yours and there’s no way to get it back. You can’t get back your virginity. Your innocence. The clawing feeling of someone’s hands on your body, the horrible feeling that your body isn’t yours. It stays with you. The feeling that it’s just a toy for someone else to play with. Your only worth is your body. The constant feeling that all eyes are on your body. People only love your body, and not who you are as a person. You feel dirty, gross. You’ve lost your purity, and your body is forever marked. You dread looking in the mirror, you dread seeing the body that led to all of this. The body that took your innocence from you. It’s when you’re hurt so badly that you have to grow up. You're forced to confront the ugly truth-there's nothing you can do about it. The only thing you can do is accept it and learn to live with it.

But situations like these are what allows for growth and maturing. As much as it may hurt in the moment, healing is what allows for that growth. You're never really fully healed after experiences that will permanently affect you-they'll leave scars that you ultimately can't ever get rid of. Gibran explains this loss of innocence as the "burying [of] his past selves.” Gibran himself had a difficult childhood-he grew up during a time of war, fighting, and religious oppression. Poetry was his outlet, his way of expressing himself. His poems often described peaceful parts of his childhood that, as an adult, he no longer could experience. In this specific poem, he too likely suffered some sort of traumatic experience. But his response is not to mourn, but to celebrate. To see it in a positive way. Rather than seeing his loss of innocence as being something to mourn, he sees it as something positive. He accepts that his innocence is gone, and is ready to embrace healing and growing from the experience. 

Trauma can hurt you and permanently scar you. But through it you grow up, you learn to become an adult. And while part of you can never be recovered, you learn how to be a better person. You grow, you become stronger. The lesson of Gibran's poem is to learn to grow from trauma-it’s something that will inevitably happen to you. It will hurt, and it will change your life. But it’s important to never become cruel or cynical - and to never stop seeing the world as a place full of hope and possibilities.