Memento Mori

And now for today's episode of...

(I'll get to the new logo soon...ish.)

Settle in, dear readers.  Today might feel a little uncomfortable.

On evening of August 11th, I got a text message that just said one thing:  "Robin Williams is dead."

I blinked once when I read it, and shot back a very hasty, "What?"

False reports come out pretty often, so I corroborated with the news sites myself.  It was true.  One of the kings of comedy of our generation, a man I had watched from cradle to adulthood, had passed into the great beyond.

If I'd been on Facebook, I probably would have found out sooner.  My news feed was flooded with people posting screenshots from Good Will Hunting, Aladdin, Patch Adams, etc., etc., everyone talking about how they felt a little bit of their childhood die.

Everyone but me.  Maybe it hadn't fully hit me yet.  Maybe I'm just soulless.  But as sad as I was, I wasn't heartbroken like everyone else.  (Mind you - this was before I found out that he had taken his own life, but that's an entirely different topic that I won't touch upon today.)  Don't get me wrong, I loved many of the movies I saw him in.  But they were just films, and to me, he was always just a goofy, raunchy, if always warm actor.

Ok, this admittedly made me choke up a touch.

The next morning, I was browsing Twitter when another trending story popped up.  Silver screen star Lauren Bacall had passed away.  I've only seen a couple of her movies, one of which was her voice acting in the Pixar-dubbed Howl's Moving Castle, so maybe that doesn't even count (though - seriously, that voice...), so I was pretty confused as to why I was actually a little more saddened by her passing.  Unlike Mr. Williams, she was fairly old when she passed, so her death was much less shocking to the world.  But... I liked her.  I liked her work.  Maybe it resonated with me a bit.  So maybe that was enough.

Three days later, just as I was stepping in the car to visit family and friends in Philly, a friend from my dance studio sent me a text.  An acquaintance from another studio had passed away after she'd been in a serious motor vehicle accident.  I was pretty upset during the drive and even a bit after, which made the least sense to me.  I had only ever met this woman once and exchanged maybe several words with her over dinner, and unless I decided to switch my studio, I was probably never going to see her again.  She struck me as being a kind person, though left no strong memories. And yet, she was gone, and I missed her.  I missed the conversations we'd never have and the dances we'd never share.

A friend's mom once said to me that death comes in threes.  Taken at face value, that's a poor platitude, given the mortality rate across the world.  When I think about it more, I think what she meant was that the announcement of, I guess, what we might consider to be relevant deaths usually comes in threes.  And, to be honest, it has been something of a trend in my life.  In college, three professors that I had really looked up to passed away within the span of about two years.  Three of my grandparents died within somewhat short succession of each other.  Each set hit me in pretty varying degrees, but regardless, each time, I was shaken.

I've never really felt like I've known how to deal with death.  In high school, every 13th of the month (the date was chosen entirely arbitrarily), I would remain silent for the whole day and write the following characters on my arms in black eyeliner:

紀念逝者 -- Honor the dead

珍惜生活 -- Treasure the living

It's probably not even the right translation, but all I had in those days was Babelfish.  In hindsight, it was a really awkward tradition that did nothing but prove how socially inept I was.

When I was college, I consoled myself on the loss of my favorite professor by imagining that he was taken into the afterlife by a gothic lolita girl, wielding a parasol that doubled as her scythe, possibly signaling that how thin my connection to reality is.

Her name is Morbid Mary.  She even has a poem.

I've thought a great deal about what happens after we die, but never really the effect of death on the those left behind, or how it affects me.  We can prepare all we like, but death is always jarring for the living.   We all lead such brief lives; people enter and exit so frequently, but they always leave an impression, no matter how small.  And when their light is extinguished, that's it.  No more chances for a quick "Hello" SMS.  No more "maybe I'll call them to catch up over a cup of coffee."  No more flashing small smiles as you pass in the hallway.

And then the small and insignificant don't seem so insignificant anymore.

Until the next.