Quintessentialist

No one expects a thirty year old man to pass away in his sleep. His family doesn’t expect to stand over his pale body framed in a silk-lined casket. They don’t expect a he to become an it, a corpse, another grave marker in a field of many. Yet this was how I first met death, an eight year old at her uncle’s funeral. Because of his death, I learned how to truly live.

I couldn’t fathom the idea that m uncle was little more than an abandoned building; at any moment I expected his hand to tighten around mine and laugh off such a convincing hoax. What I realized is that death is only final in a physical sense – I still have the memories of our midnight kitchen raids, and the fish dinners he made with the leftover bounty of summer fishing job – and in that way, he has been immortalized. Part of the comfort of writing is knowing that en and paper are sometimes more effective in record keeping than memory, and that thoughts can be forever preserved on paper; to keep a person living in ink makes death a little more palatable.

Being preserved in this way makes the future of physical decay easier to accept in others but not in ourselves. Most of us find it difficult to deny our inner Dorian Gray – while we obsess over the aging proves, or more accurately, our expiration date, we overlook the valuable years we’re given. To live is not trudging to one’s nine-to-five job, paying the bills, doing the laundry, meticulously cleaning an over-priced car. To live means following my uncle’s example: secretly drinking out of the milk jug, wearing shorts in the middle of an Alaskan winter just to feel the cold – to live is more than existing at the most biological level, it is, as Steve jobs said, staying hungry and foolish.

Death must not only be acknowledged, but accepted. Death and its deadline shouldn’t be feared, but rather, the days in between should be welcomed as a gift. To truly live means accepting the beauty, the opportunity, and the risk of every day living; it means having an excellent sense of humor, and laughing with death when the punch line of his final joke is delivered.