Don't Fear The Reaper

I've got some bad news for you. You're going to die. Yeah, I know. So am I. Sucks, doesn't it? It probably won't happen today and more likely than not, it won't happen tomorrow. But it's going to happen. One day, sometime in the future, you and I will cease to exist. Who knows what'll get us? Maybe it'll be the cancer. Or a heart attack. Maybe one of us will be the subject of an act of random violence. That's creepy to consider, isn't it? Maybe we'll die in a car accident. Or a plane crash. Or of some rare disease we can't even name. Maybe we'll choke to death on a breadstick. Maybe we'll fall down the stairs, like that old pastry chef on Sesame Street. The means, the way we'll die, really isn't important. What matters is that we're all riding on that death train to the Great Beyond. We're all going to die. So, with that knowledge, with that certainty, how do we live out the days and years we have left?

Now, I'm sure most of you are thinking "What is up with this morbid shit? Why write about this?"

It's a fair question. Death makes people uncomfortable. No wants to think about death, let alone talk about it, until you're forced to. Until you get sick or until someone you know -- a family member or a friend -- dies and you have drag yourself to a wake or a funeral. Then death is in your face. It's unavoidable. You're staring at the lifeless facsimile of a body, the barren husk of someone you love, someone who was walking, jumping around, yelling, joking, and laughing just a few days or weeks before. Someone who is no longer. Then.... then there's no evading death. It's right there. You've got to face the unfortunate reality that you're never going to see that person again, at least, not in the way they were.

Most of us suffer through it, half paying attention, half in denial. We listen to the eulogies, laugh along, maybe even shed a few tears. Then we go home, shower, go out and have a stiff drink (or two or three) in honor of the deceased. We carry their memory with us, this tiny phantasm in the back of our mind who comes out whenever we hear a certain song or see a faded picture of the departed. But all the while, we ignore death. We put it in the closet, hide the boogeyman.

Ssssssh. Maybe if we pretend it's not here, maybe if we're really really quiet, it will leave us alone. Maybe it'll go bug someone else.

That's what we do, and it's human and natural. But of course, you can't bury death. Death buries you. Eventually, it comes a'callin' and all the nice things you own -- the Beemer, the B&B Italia sofa, the Rolex watch, the Gucci boots, the trophy wife --don't mean a fucking thing. They won't be going with you. They won't save you. All of a sudden you'll see them for what they were your entire life: objects. Toys. The people you love -- your mother, your sister, your father, your sons, your daughters -- you're going to leave them behind. They're not going with you either. All those sports teams you went crazy over, lost sleep over, spent hours, days, months following, like it was the most important thing in the world? Totally meaningless. Trivial. Because your life is ending. Who gives a shit about the Red Sox or Celtics then? All those hours you spent working in your office so you could ascend in your career and grab that brass ring, that partnership, that Vice-Presidential CEO/CFO/COO status, so you could become Head Cashier at the local Walmart, when you get the death sentence, you'll see that all that career climbing was really just to boost your puny, insecure ego. So you could feel competent, important, powerful, WORTHY. All that preoccupation with money, just to buy more objects to outlive you. What the fuck for?

Shat? Hit it, buddy!



In Myanmar and China, tens of thousands of people, close to 100,000 dead before it's all said and done. For my fellow Americans out there, let me put it into terms you can understand. That's fifty 9/11s. Almost a hundred thousand nameless men, women, and children, drowned and crushed. They call cyclones and earthquakes "Acts of God." I find that funny. Massive plates shift under the earth. A weather system kicks up in the tropics and drops a flood of rain on low-lying deltas, and these are "Acts of God." Like God is sitting there somewhere, bored out of his eternal mind, eating a Hot Pocket, and He decides He's going to "act" and kill a shitload of people for no apparent reason, other than their shitty luck at living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ridiculous. But what's remarkable to me is the utter randomness and indiscretion of these supposed "Acts of God." One person dies, and the other, perhaps just a few feet away, lives. Why? Who the hell knows?

Death is everywhere you look. It's in the newspaper every single day. It's gotten to be so common, so routine, that we barely notice anymore. Does anyone raise an eyebrow over a school shooting that results in fewer than ten deaths? If Columbine was the appetizer, then wasn't Virginia Tech the after-dinner aperitif? Nobody flinches anymore. It's got to be truly shocking and unexpected now. A lot of people have to die for most people to take notice, to feel death. Or, in the case of Ted Kennedy, sometimes only a single seemingly-immortal person needs to become terminally ill for death to really hit home.

In a week, it will be the sixteenth anniversary of the death of Anne, my first friend in this life, who was killed in a motorcycle accident at the very unripe age of 23. On July 21st, nine days after the wedding of my beautiful Sister T., it will be the eleventh anniversary of the death of my rambunctious Uncle Saverio, who died of a heart attack at the age of 48, three months before the wedding of my beautiful Sister J. I visited his grave two weeks ago. Even though I could see his tiny framed picture hanging on the stoneface, right above the letters that spelled his name and the numbers that marked his birth and death, it still did not seem real to me. That this man, who let me steal his cologne, who flirted with my girlfriends to piss me off, who gave me his dress shirts, who taught me to carry a bit more flair in my wardrobe ("Why do you always wear black? You dress like a priest."), who cooked like nobody's business and laughed at everything, is gone for good. At work, I still remember the sardonic and annoyingly funny disposition of John K., a paralegal who died of throat cancer at the unripe age of 40. I still have the thank you message he sent me from his BlackBerry a few weeks before he died.

All of it was a shock to me when it happened. Because death is shocking. It jars your life. When Anne died in 1992, I was working in a supermarket in NH. For days afterward, I would break down for no reason. I'd be stocking oranges, avocados, or maybe cucumbers, I'd think of something from our childhood, and then I'd start crying like a Russian grandmother. It was embarrassing. The first cut is always the deepest. Her death was a premature wake-up call to the bookend on the other side of life and the extreme rapidity with which it can manifest itself. Her death, and the death of my favorite uncle a few years later, chiseled away at my denial of death, at the non-reality of it. Death became real, as real a part of life as the sun rising.

So what to do about all this? What's the point? On the surface, it's pretty damn depressing. But I guess it's in how you look at it. If you think that this life, this body, this experience is all there is, yeah, it's depressing. If all you are is your body, and your body is destined to break down like an old jalopy someday, then I guess focusing on this stuff is a bit of a downer and you probably wish you'd read something else besides this drivel for the past five minutes.

But there's another way to look at it. One could view death as the finishing of one cycle and the beginning of another. We don't know what happens after a person dies. All we know is that a person's body looks pretty lousy after death. All that formaldehyde and makeup. But if you believe, as I do, that you're not just the body you're occupying in this life, you're not just tissue, organs, skin, and bone, then death holds an entirely different meaning. It becomes a passage, a waystation to the next existence. It's not the end. It's just an intermission. A potentially painful, slow-moving, and stressful intermission, yes, but an intermission nonetheless. Which will be followed by another act in the play that is your evolutionary spiritual progression. Death is like birth. Cold, unpleasant, shocking to the system, but in the end, temporary.

Even though the people I mentioned above have passed, as have several other members of my family, I've never felt they were dead. Gone yes, dead no. I actually feel the presence of these people in my life on a daily basis. While I'm walking to work, driving on 95, at moments of extreme stress, at moments of calm. I feel them there somehow. It's like they're behind this door and I can't see them with my eyes, but I know they're there. And that's really all that death is, going through that door, passing to the other side.

Still, I'm in no fucking hurry for it.