I'm not looking forward to death, yet. My life is good, I still think there's plenty to do in this world and I have an appropriate amount of Serotonin coursing through my brain. I'd argue that it's probably not healthy to long for the cold embrace of death. If you do wish to die, chances are that it's because you aren't healthy (i.e.- nuts, decrepit, terminally ill and in chronic pain, a straight man being repeatedly forced to watch Queer As Folk by his Wife, etc).
I mention all this because a buddy of mine, Dan Scott, died recently. He was an exceptionally intelligent person who was loved and respected by many people. At least, that's what I gathered by the speakers at his funeral, of which I was one. Granted, I accept that people tend not to speak too poorly of you at your funeral but you get the idea. Dan was awesome. Dan was too young and I wish he hadn't died, as do many.
Fortunately, though I miss him and will always, I am not incapacitated by grief. This is, in part, because he died doing something that he loved and that we weren't as close as we could have been. Dan and I only recently began speaking again after losing touch when I changed careers (Dan was a Paramedic in Oakland as well). I tend to believe that there is no point in being incapacitated by grief, especially when the person you are grieving would think it was silly that you were acting in such a manner. I tend to believe that Dan would have.
I don't think that I'm emotionally crippled, though Tonya has argued to the contrary. My lack of emotional devastation is not born out of lacking facilities to produce the required chemicals; I just don't see a point in it. I'm around death all the time. People die. You will die. I will die. To me, death is difficult when it's unexpected (Grandma died of AIDS contracted by risky sexual behavior), unjust (Grandma is shot down by the police for running a stop sign on the Lark Scooter), or meaningless (Grandma lives to the ripe old age of ninety and is beaten to death by the Meals On Wheels dude). I can understand feeling significant grief in these situations, grief that would maybe drive me to take a few days off work.
Conversely, I can't really relate to people who feel compelled to drink themselves into oblivion after they have Fluffy put down at age twenty-six. Nor can I fathom why people always seem to be so horrified that Grandma dies of cancer at age eighty-three. There's no way those circumstances could be seen as unjust, premature, meaningless or unexpected. All living things die. That's what makes the distinction between things that are alive and those that are inanimate. Stop signs don't die (unless their in Latin neighborhoods where the sidewalks are never safe on Sundays), CD's don't die (though they should in many cases, fucking Creed and shit), and furniture doesn't die (unless it comes from Ikea, in which case it never makes it past infancy). I can't help but think that people who are so devastated by deaths such as this are just total pussies. Pull yourself together for fuck's sake, there are real tragedies happening in the world and you aren't going through one of them. Grow up. |
