death - personal processing

Murder. It was an accident - he was drunk, he shot his girlfriend in the face 15 minutes after their friends left. Their friends happened to be one of my close friends' sister and brother-in-law, who were as close to the woman who was shot as I am to my friend. My friend calls me and tells me she's thinking about us, and she's scared, and to be careful who I hang out with.
How do I respond? Most of us spend our time staring sideways at death or completely blocking it out, but when it slaps you in the gut you've got nowhere to go.
I was thinking about death last night. Happens pretty often, but this time I thought: what would I leave behind if I were to accisentally swerve off the dark road and cut off this life in the next hour? And I wonder why that's the only question that seems important? What else is there? I think there's either that question or no question at all. If life is meaningless, there's certainly no question. You die, those you changed die, and life on earth continues in a mostly blind scurry towards more death.. which certainly makes death quite a large part of life if we think of the collective body of humans and animals and living things on earth... it's kind of beautiful to think of it that way, kind of like a cycle, an unstoppable rotation of life, life, life, and in between there must be death in order for life to continue. Death is a part of life. That gives us all a purpose. We all must die so life can go on. We are working, striving, kicking and screaming or struggling and sighing, consuming, maybe dumbly striding on our way toward the inevitable. It must occur.
But when? And why that moment for each person? Quite possibly, it doesn't matter at all. But what if it does? The inevitability of death to make way for life makes sense to one part of me, but the other part of every single human is struggling with the idea that their life means more than the physical world implies - some of us don't even look at the physical world in order to continue our fancies about the effect we have on it. And I'm sorry to call anything a fancy; I certainly don't have a hold on any truth. I only know some truths about myself, and one of them is my denial in the past - and likely somehow in the present - of what's going on around me. I have to protect my little emotions and stability, you know. I could go my whole life in this cocoon, until sweet or vicious death, however you want to see it, opens up my mind to truth or closes it off forever without ever having a breath of fresh air. You see, my mind is the only thing I have - it will be with me my whole life; it has always been with me, I know it is there beyond a doubt - Descartes, I think therefore I am - and it's the only thing on which I have to rely when death or anything else pops up out of nowhere... and even that one thing that I know is true and exists and I cannot doubt; it's the greatest deciever of them all. The world is a hopeless mess of deceit and illusions. I really feel that way, I am not making some grand statement to sound interesting or whatever... think about it. How much truth is there out there? We lie, we believe what our parents tell us and then what our friends tell us and then our professors, all the while our society, our America is screaming in the background "this is black and white, this is a sin, this kind of person is greater than this kind," etc. etc. etc. And we long to be free of all the deception and twisted thoughts but it might just kill us, and anyway we don't know ho to live any other way. So we do what we know. And when life ends maybe it won't matter anyway.
I have to believe, though, that I am working toward some greater good, even if it won't matter in the future, because this life is all I have. Someone or something gave me this clay and these tools and a million extraneous influences, so my options are to throw the clay away and assume it's a waste, or use it, use it, observe it, change it, challenge it, keeping in mind the change that it does have a meaning and a purpose - or at least working toward a better shape every day. That's all we do, right? Work toward a better something. So here I am working, I've got to keep hoping, I can't let life wash me away in complacency, got to stay conscious, and there will be something in the end. Or I'll find it in the now.