wordsimageslife
an exploration of life as a parent & designer

Invoking the Sadness Clause

Wrapped In Grey from the album Nonsuch by XTC

It's really no one's fault. Life and death go hand in hand. They are, as remembered from a childhood camp song, the cycle of life. From dust to dust, from sunrise to sunset, we live and we die. This is the way it has always been.

In some ways I think death is much easier then watching the process. As an observer, I can only imagine what it must be like for the person who's actually living the process with the knowledge that an end is imminent. While we are all living the process, most of us don't have any pre-determined, or estimated—beyond the actuarial charts of insurance companies—end. We live basically knowing tomorrow is nothing more than tomorrow. It could be said that most of us, myself included, take life pretty much for granted.

In my life, I've experienced death more times than I would like. From friends in high school (tragic accidents to say the least) to college buddies from disease and drugs and elder family members from a variety of ailments. Each time, my reactions have been guided by my position in life at the time as well as my relationship with the person that passed. As an almost always emotional person, I usually go overboard with my reactions (when my friend Harriet died of cancer at the age of 32, I was so distraught at her funeral that I started eating dirt, I have no explanation for that). I will always remember the frigid February day when we had to bury my friend Rick (AIDS). It was brutal weather, an ice storm, and my cat also died that night from a heart attack. Now that was truly strange timing.

When my grandmother died in 1996, I got through it better because of some of the 'miracles' that occurred and the fact that she had lived a very long, very rewarding life. She died at 91 but was still taking college courses well into her 80's. And she was, in a way, my best friend since high school and I will treasure that forever. The story I like to tell is that she stayed alive long enough to hold her first great-grandchild, Isabella. The pictures didn't come out too well but we do have them. She died four days later. (Lung cancer. Discovered in June of 1996, after she has smoked for some 70 years) I had a theme song for her passing, morbid I know, but it was "Time of Your Life" by Green Day.

The only death I ever used to my 'advantage' was that of my G-dmother Marigold. She died at the same time Kwame Toure came to the University of Maryland and said, "The only good Zionist, is a dead Zionist." Her death made for a great opening to my opinion piece in the next day's Diamondback on Mr. Toure's anti-Semetic comments.

When I started penning this piece, the title came to me while waiting for my lunch where I felt the sadness I was carrying, I had no idea that I would revisit so many lives lost. It's refreshing to know that none of them have been forgotten, not even the ones from high school who's lives were truly wasted. (One of them died while climbing the tower of a power grid and was electrocuted) But still I remember their names, their faces and whatever influences they had in my life.

So, at this point, I reserve my right to be sad. I encourage each of us to just take a little more time in our day to value those things that we hold dear but find so easy to take for granted. I'd like to think that death can teach us lessons like why not to hold a grudge. But, honestly I think I'm being way too optimisitc about that. And to think I call myself a cynic.

Now the hard part about the sadness clause is not letting it affect the other parts of your life. Like almost starting to cry when you hug your kids good-night, or just thinking about some silly event way past that meant something then and is somewhat trivial now. It is a good chance to check out which friends are real and which, well, this may seem unfair, are just along for the ride up. And let me tell you, I know this is going to be a rocky road.

My last significant writing about my Dad's fight with cancer was wrapped up in war metaphors. The field of battle, the weapon's of choice, the enemy before us. But now that the enemy has taken the upper hand, I can no longer hide behind the imagination and power of my words. I can only look ahead and accept being sad.

Posted by robdesign at March 10, 2004 05:19 PM