I am not your old man but if I were I would tell you that death is a critical part of life. It seems a strange to say, I know. Death is the closing parenthesis, which opened at your birth. Between the brackets you want your input to be only the most salient stuff but know it won’t be. You will fill the confines with beauty and foolishness – the lust for the girl with pigtails three rows from you in a wooden seat and desk, the long love of the partner who fills more days than you will spend with anyone else.
You will fill it with protests in blue jeans because you will not be controlled by the man, only to look around and realize everyone is in denim, and your generation only moved one step further along the political spectrum from your parents’.
You abandon such trivia to become an arbiter of vast consumption – fast cars, gas, alcohol, drugs, stuff that fills the air, along with your drawers, closets, boxes in your garage you won’t open for years but won’t abandon to Goodwill or the trash bin for fear of losing something important you can’t even remember.
You will fill your parens with dates and times and schedules and meetings and anniversaries and birthdays and Valentines and Christmases and Thanksgivings…slicing up your life between these personal and professional holidays. The rest of your time is broken by football or baseball or golf or curling on tv along with 500 other channels insuring you will never be bored or left to your own thoughts and ideas.
If you are lucky, you will fill some of it with friends and children and spouses and family and know the taste of love, its drag and lift, drowning and buoyancy, heartbreak and hubris and the brief sense of heartbeats in tandem. You will wonder at your legacy – do you have one, can you create one, is a legacy even important. You will know the need for it leads you away from the tangible connections in your life in hopes of being remembered by those you will never know rather than the ones who already love you. Hopefully you will recognize at some moment, the famous and un-famous are lost to time with the same abandonment as the detritus stored in boxes in your garage.
You will, at some juncture of time, confront death – a loved one, a relative, a mentor, a parent, me, and the scent of life should change forever if you are paying attention. You should recognize life is not immutable, not unlimited. You will run through all the feelings, abandonment, anger, despair, hurt, euphoria, a feeling of naught. You will sit in a chair, on a couch, sprawl on a bed, rock in a rocker focused on the wrong thing. You will focus on what is gone, not on what has been gifted. If you are attentive, your intake and exhale should have new purpose – to appreciate the simple tastes of the life available to you.
You will, I hope, recognize how precious you are and rid yourself of the boxes and bullshit and barriers fobbed off by the buried and realize you are alive and for however long it lasts it is your life and you must sample well and fully. None of us knows what happens after. None of us. So, savor it. The end paren is coming.