Mortality, it's tricky

Here’s a tip—stay out of the obituaries as long as you can.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a well written obit as well as the next guy and what with people my age showing up in there (say what!!??), that whole section of the newspaper is beginning to resemble my high school yearbook. But you never know what they are going to write about you.

Not long ago I thought I might be writing one for my oldest sister. She fell while going to her mailbox—she broke her arm, hit her head on a rock, was knocked unconscious and taken to the emergency room. So I passed the time jotting down some notes about the more interesting parts of her life---her volatile on-off relationship with Elvis Presley, the invention of cosmetics, her hobby of buying up small islands around the world---but she came to and suddenly remembered all the words to the song “ American Pie” so for me the pressure is off.

Obituaries avoid speaking ill of the dead and lean towards comfort and glossing over the rough spots of life. However the real purpose of an obituary is to summarize a life and remind us of our mortality. One day the world we leave behind will take a cold academic look at our lives and attempt to record our contribution to the overall good of mankind (“He was well behaved and his Sunday column was always submitted before the deadline with very few spelling errors. His editor mourned the loss stating “ The little guy would always spring for lunch”.) Hey, it is what it is.

I”ve arrived at that place in life that makes me shudder when the message blinks on my cell phone screen and warns “You have been disconnected.” I cringe when the sensual husky voice of the English lady in my GPS unit says “ You have reached your final destination”. And when the airline attendance tells me that “You’ll be on the ground shortly” well, I just want to cry. Is that anyway to talk to someone like me? The attendant seems to imply that shortly I will be lying prostrate with emergency personnel tearing open my shirt, applying paddles to my chest and screaming “Clear!” then a high pitched whine and ZZZT!

It gives me pause when I see an old gray faced cat wander through our front yard on a wonderful summer evening when everything else seems so full of life. At twelve years of age he moves slowly, this is probably his last summer. I want to write something poetic about this moment but I used up all my despair over death by the time I was 22. I was a writer then though no one knew it —that was one of my best kept secrets and still is. I roamed the college campus with the rest of the writer wannabees listening to Janis Joplin and Jimmie Hendrix and writing volumes about death and mortality. Then we went out for pizza and beer.

I don’t want to wait for emergency service personnel to tell me to lie quietly, that everything will be just fine. I want to stomp into a dark biker bar, order a drink that comes in a used oil can, light up a fat cigar, shoulder my way up to the meanest looking guy in there, blow thick blue smoke in his bearded scarred face and announce to the room “Which one of you ladies think they can take a 58-year-old newspaper columnist?”

So live boldly, light a candle in the darkness, make a difference…but don’t go crazy.