Unfortunately, I seem to need a steady stream of reminders that life is fragile. I want to live fully conscious of my mortality to avoid taking my health, my wife, my daughters, my extended family, my friends, my work, and nature for granted. It’s a work in progress.
This week I received a postcard with information about my 30 year high school reunion (insert joke here). A few minutes later I had created a minimalist profile and was catching up with classmates via their profiles. Eight classmates have died, two that I knew. Had I been thinking like a mathematician, that wouldn’t have been too surprising, but I wasn’t, so it was.
Equally poignant, an older neighbor-friend died suddenly in his sleep a few weeks ago. Bill was a hardcore cyclist who rode year round no matter how shitty the Pacific Northwest weather. Tough as nails, he conquered RAMROD twice by himself. He wasn’t fast, but everything is relative. His memorial was Saturday at Olympia Country Club. I was the second or third person to sign a poster his widower had laid out on a table surrounded by touching family pictures. Not sure what to write, I peeked at what the elderly gentleman that went right before me wrote. “Bill, you don’t have to go at my pace anymore. You were a good friend that always understood me.”
I think that was and is moving.
In Sunday’s sermon, Pastor John touched upon what he referred to as our society’s three “A’s”, affluence, appearance, and ambition. Maybe ambition gets a bad rap. At the memorial I joked to L and J that when I go they’ll have the same RAMROD t-shirts hanging from my memorial table. My ambition is for some friends to be there and for them to say I was a good friend.
Pressing Pause 
IMHO, you have already achieved that one…time to move on to affluence and appearance.
Very nice of you, but you may be my only friend to show given mounting Monday morning track workout antipathy. :)
Ron:
I started thinking a lot about mortality when I was about eight years old. In fact I remember the evening quite well. I like to say it was my mother’s fault, sharing Alexandra’s story in her father’s words with me from the pages of Time Magazine, her battle with cystic fibrosis, how funny and brave and matter-of-fact she was even as her parents held her upside down to loosen the phlegm from her lungs. She couldn’t have been much older than me, and yet she was well aware that she was dying. She faced this with a maturity well beyond her years, a self-containment. She was nothing like me; in her crisis she was dignified, almost noble. I remember thinking, And she’s kind of pretty too.
So I carried the thought of her to sleep with me. Tossing and turning I kept remembering what she’d told the nurse: I’m going home to die…but don’t tell my parents because it’ll upset them.
The next morning getting ready for school, I was aware of only one thing: when you get home, you must find that magazine wherever it is, and read that story again—in full.
But I didn’t realize reading that story once more, just to get the details right, would turn into an almost obsessive habit. As the days and weeks went by, I’d return to the magazine repeatedly and read the story top to bottom once more. I bombarded my mother with questions. What is cystic fibrosis? Do you think she actually died? Was she an only child? I’d find ways to bring her up in my conversations with Mom. I remember one Saturday afternoon “taking a quick break” from hanging out with toys in our finished basement to run upstairs because I felt a powerful urge to have yet another go at the story, perhaps because I simply needed to torture myself by staring back into her hypnotic eyes.
I am not sure whether or not Alexandra was the reason I turned into a walking encyclopedia on diseases when I was a kid, I can’t remember now. I might have just been a marionette searching for strings. But I do recall that my mother grew weary of my questions and my need to talk about this girl and what had befallen her. I do remember the protracted period of darkness that followed and being filled with emotions I’d never experienced before: furry nocturnal sensations fluttering in the narrow lights of my chest like moths; fatigue and sadness and the daily weighing in of a hollowed heart trying to gnaw its way to the end of pain.
Guess what though? This might be the year I’ve come full circle. Mangled beyond repair by notions of those three A’s Pastor John spoke of, I think this is the year I’ve finally started shedding my old skins, exuding from my pores a river of masks and pantomimes. I mean I never thought Michael Jackson would be dead around the time I was entering my middle thirties. I mean I can still remember him telling Martin Bashir he wanted to, or intended to, live forever. And I believed him too, almost.
For me his death has finally busted open, put to an end, the last half-whispers that perhaps phoenix-like we can be reborn from the wombs of the great fires, and become conquerors of impossible dreams, immortal and perfected.
Sanity, or the peace of acceptance at that which I can’t change, always returns when I remind myself to simply anchor myself to this moment, which is all I have at any rate, and then next and the next.
We need to come up with a new word or phrase for when a comment exceeds in clarity, insight, and interest the original post. I’m open to suggestions.