Death

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday.

He is one of my heroes. Was and still is.

But he's dead now, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I'm obviously bummed out, and on the border of being upset. Morose? I don't know. Maybe.

I was just beginning my hum-drum pre-work morning routine of coffee and Facebook checkery when I saw that he had died, and my immediate reaction was anger. I guess I skipped stages 1 and 2.
I slammed the desk with my fist, cursed, and sighed the sigh of a loser, the sign of the lonely child I used to be.

I've never really been particularly troubled by death. From a young age I've recognized it as what it is: an unfortunate necessity. As morbid as that is for a child to come to terms with, it took several years before I realized that the same must also be true for every other living thing on the planet, most notably, every other human I've ever known.  It's something that I inevitably think about any time I meet someone new. Will I outlive this person? Will they be part of my life whenever one of us dies?

These aren't things I choose to think about. They just happen. And it's not at all dark or worrisome. To consider death as some dark, mysterious phenomenon clouded with superstition and fear seems like a terrible waste of time and emotional energy.  It's sad whenever people die, but that's part of being alive. As much as I'd like to quote something pithy and inspirational, I think that to do so would be equally wasteful.

I don't mean to be cold, but really-- it's not like nobody sees it coming.

Sometimes death is a premature tragedy. Sometimes death is an unavoidable accident. But death comes for us all. To fail to recognize this is... stupid.

Death is hard, of course, but I think that people make it harder than it has to be. People turn it into a process, a labor. And because people so often take it harder than I do, I wonder if there is something wrong with me. I don't think there is. I don't think I'm a distanced or emotionally cold person. I just think that I react differently to something as inevitable as the rain after a drought, or the drought itself.

"These things happen, Timmy."

I would like to say that it is fair in that it reaches us all, but that's not the case.

While the end result is equalizing, its manner and timing are hardly ever fair, just or fitting.

I'm not a stoic, but to see me at a funeral would make a stranger doubt that assertion.

I wonder how things like this will influence my relationship with my unborn children. It's pretty easy for me to deal with the fact that when someone is dead, they're dead. Time goes on, and for the dead person, reality is as it was before they were born.

Convention would suggest that children want humans and animals to go on living in some kind of "better place."  Is it really better to tell that to a child? Doesn't that inevitably lead to the cognitive dissonance associated with everything being better off dead, in that better place? If they're smart enough to understand what you're telling them, they'll also be smart enough to know that there are some problems with your story. How do you know about this better place? What is it like? Why is it there? Why do we have to live to get there first? These are all questions we can't answer without out-right lying to kids. The best we could hope for, once we're committed to this better place idea, is some kind of  soothing non-answer.

Wouldn't honesty be the best policy?

"I don't know what happens when we die, Timmy. Nobody does. But everybody dies. The trees in the yard will die, Aunt Sally will die, and I will die. You'll eventually die. But it's not something to be afraid of, because you can't escape it. The best thing you can do is enjoy your life and make it meaningful."

Is that too much for a kid? It's too much for a lot of the adults I know.