The Inevitability of Death

It'll be really easy to ramble to no end on this subject, but I'm going to keep it short and possibly add to this blog as time goes by. I'm possibly abnormally grave.  I ponder my mortality and the mortality of the people I know and love often. It's what I was raised up in.  Death hovered over me in youth by the simple absence of maternal Grandparents in my life.  My mother lost her mother when she was 9 years old, and her father passed away when I was 8 months old.  I have no memories of them, but in life and death they shaped my mother's personality and temperament.  My mother lost an elder sister and brother when she was very young, so I can understand her.

I learned about these deaths when I was relatively young, whether I understood the significance of them or not.  Her siblings' deaths were tied to other things, her sister's death being a factor in my mother not being accepted into the Police academy, my first born niece being named for my uncle who succumb to cancer near the time my sister was born.

My Father's father passed away when I was in 2nd grade, and it was the 1st death that seemed to register with me, because I think I saw my father cry for the first time. I'm not sure about that memory.  What I am sure of is this:  The death of your elders, particularly the aged ones, is something we're expected to experience.  The nature of my father's professions made me fear for his life everyday.  My mother's smoking and what I recall as a cancer scare when I was pretty young made heavy impressions on me as well.  Youth and death aren't so common in our day and age, in the "1st" world, but that's not the reality I came to know.

As a preteen and teen one of my first friends I'd made after my parent's divorce resulted in our house being sold and us moving to a town home had a seizure and drowned in the Meramec river.  My sophomore year my cousin Martez was killed in an "accidental" shooting.  He was one of my heroes growing up, and somehow a rival, he was the closest thing I ever had to a big brother. By my junior year of high school 3 more classmates had died, 2 murdered, one from carbon monoxide poisoning with the majority of his family the year after he graduated.  All this time my 2nd born niece was undergoing multiple heart surgeries and immunity issues.  Our family was basically left to accept that should would live to be 4 years old according to her Doctors.  When she passed away at the onset of my sophomore year of college I was already heartbroken and defeated.

I redirected my grief, and sought to focus on celebrating her memory, and the impact of our love towards her.  At the same time popular figures were dying with each passing season, actors, musicians, comedians, mostly young, in some cases self-destructive.  Sadly, fellow students at Truman died during my years there, car accidents, health concerns, at times when they were young and vital.  By the end of my time there, two classmates and a couple of casual acquaintances had died, my father had been diagnosed with cancer, he mother died, my mother had a health scare, I'd lost several elder family members of generations past, and a mentor of mine had nearly died.  Not long after I left Truman, another mentor, Rupert Rinehart, passed away, had friends and family undergo life-threatening circumstances, young and old alike. I also had a few health scares myself.  My mentor at Truman who had a health scare passed away, my childhood role model my cousin Joe succumb to cancer at the age of 45, a year later my Uncle Junebug succumb to a similar ailment.  My paternal Great Grandmother & Great Uncle would pass away well into their 90s towards the end of the decade that saw a second wave of untimely deaths for actors, comedians, and musicians.

All of that and the knowledge that the most promising and inspiring agents of social and moral change in the history of humanity have been killed, most in the prime of their lives, relatively young, it almost seems delusional to not view life with some measure of gravity.  But, as the saying goes, it's like "Beating a dead horse".

One thing I know is, when I embraced my mortality and used that awareness to magnify my value of Life, I was revitalized from my grieving.  When my Great Uncle passed and in my heart I felt ready to honor him, how he had been an inspiration and role model in my youngest days, it sparked something in me, but that spark didn't last.  Now disassociation seems to be my default reaction.  The presence of death, the threat of it, can be overwhelming, at my school, we have a children who have lost parents, siblings, and at least one who has a form of cancer that has effectively numbered his days.  It's gotten to me.  I've lost those steadfast, seemingly immortal elders in my life, and what's left is my parents, whose mortality I am all too aware of, and been wrestling with for as long as I can literally remember.  And I'm not getting any younger.  I marvel at my great nieces and nephews, who are carbon copies of my nieces and nephews, who I help in my hands as infants, myself still a child. People fret over a doomsday prediction, when we aren't promised the next breath.  For me it's a high wire act finding a well-adjusted perspective to cling to.