The Lycan's Mark

Chapter Fifty Six

Chapter Fifty Six

Death was inevitable.

Everyone dies. People die every day, every minute, every second yet when it happens it's still a shock to the system. Why does death shock people when it comes hand in hand with life?

We're born, we live and then we die. That's life. It's the same for every human, there are no exceptions. The only part that is different for everyone is what happens in between being born and dying.

Yet even though death is inevitable, it still causes us grief.

Grief.

The five-letter word that has the power to destroy even the strongest of people. According to the dictionary it was a noun that meant a deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement.

Grief is all around us, everyone has experienced grief in some way or another or will do at some point in their life. Despite the looming presence of grief hanging around us we never are truly prepared for it.

I certainly wasn't.

I knew my parents would die one day, it's not something I thought about or wanted to think about but I knew it would happen one day. When I had envisioned their death, I assumed they would both die of all old, probably in their 90s after living a long and fulfilling life. They would die peacefully, perhaps in their sleep, holding each other as they drift off into the darkness.

Would it just be darkness or is there life after death? To be frank, I didn't care about what would happen after we died, it seemed like a problem for later. There was no point in worrying about death when you still had living to do.

Life was full of problems and issues to worry about, why add another worry to the list?

Apparently there were five stages of grief, stages that we go through until we're at a point where we can move on, or try to move on. The stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The stages aren't linear, you could experience these aspects of grief at different times and in a different order and you might not even experience all the stages.

Denial is very common, it's the first stage of the grieving process and it helps us minimise the overwhelming pain of loss. I went through the denial phase relatively quickly, at first I was adamant that the doctor was lying about my dad or had got the wrong person. It was hard to believe that I had spoken to him earlier on that day and now he was gone. It was hard to adjust to the new reality of live without my dad.

Anger was one of the strong emotions I felt once it had sunk in that my dad was no longer with us. I was angry at everyone, I was angry at the medical staff for failing to save him and at myself too. I saw the amount of blood he was covered in, I should have stayed with him and stopped the bleeding instead of chasing after the attacker.

Most of my anger was directed towards Vladamir, it was his fault after all. The man most likely attacked my parents because of my association with Vladamir. If Vladamir wasn't such a prick to everyone he met then he wouldn't have had so many enemies. All he seemed to do was piss people off and he enjoyed it and now my dad's death was one of the consequences of his action.

If I hadn't met him then my dad would still be alive. That led to the next person my anger was directed to- Nina.

If Nina hadn't slept with Gabriel and gotten pregnant then Vladamir wouldn't have come here and I would have never met him. What are the chances of getting pregnant from a one night stand? Did she have a magic uterus that not only got pregnant from a one night stand but also with a Lycan who has fertility issues?

Blaming other people wouldn't help the situation, what had happened in the past was in the past despite it still affecting the present and future. There was only one person to blame for my dad's death and that was the man who killed him. Blaming myself and other people around me wouldn't get my dad back, but perhaps something else could.