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HAVE I HELPED? |
My Obituary to be read at
my funeral, should it be necessary.....
Be it here resolved, on this 8th day of February 199..... oh sorry, 2006, that I
will write my own obituary so that my friends and neighbors do not have to
strain to remember positive thoughts about me. I will provide them.... This
seems altogether fitting and proper. Not that they will have a hard time
thinking of positive thoughts about me, but that there are so many that they may
need a refresher course. It is also my chance to speak from beyond the grave and
their chance to know the "real me." I will also throw in a few negative thots
and personal traits along the way to perform a fair and balanced assessment of
my life. This will be a running obituary, sort of like a blog, in that I will
enter signicant thots occasionally, and trivial ones at other times as the mood
befits me. It will most likely suffer the occasional editting as I incur the
benefit of hindsight on my "present" thoughts.
On the occasion of my death, I desire to have the current version read at my
funeral, should any care to gather. Or that not being the case, I would ask that
a copy of this obituary be placed in various public places, like the
Glastonberry tennis bulletin board, the community bulletin board at the local
Kroger, the "for sale" board at the BellSouth Center tower, and the spare copies
stacked next to the free for sale newspapers at selected locations. Others can
be air dropped over Afghanistan or maybe Syria. My lifetime aversion to normal
religious pursuits may prevent a reading from happening in a church. Or my late
"conversion" may make this possible. This is of course still a work in progress
to be worked out (and edited....).
As I age I am most struck by the fragileness of it all, and by all I mean ALL.
We are really but dust in the wind. I am struck at the incredible beauty and
the incomprehensible ugliness of it ALL. All of it, all at once, all the time,
for all time and for all people. I am struck by the incomprehension of most
people of this simple stunning fact. But then maybe ignorance is bliss.... You
see there really is every possibility available, and blaringly in evidence.
I am also struck by how in the end, and in retrospect, there are no solutions,
there are really only choices. We have seen the best of choices and the worst of
choices in our span on earth. There is no end to it. It is a journey somewhere.
Mostly in our collective struggling, often incompetent hands. But where? Ah,
there is the question.... Nowhere mostly I am afraid.
I have tried to avoid funerals in my lifetime. Life is hard enough to confront
and deal with with any kind of consciousness. But death, how do you confront and
deal with this? I often tell the story of transporting my daughter Kristina's
dog Hayley from Atlanta to Denver, where she was residing. This journey was by
air. How exactly do you tell a dog that at the end of this incredibly difficult
experience will be heart pounding joy upon reunion with her master? You can't,
or actually you can, but there is no understanding by the dog of this. I am
hoping our death is like that, and I believe it will be so. In the end, that is
likely all we have, "belief" that is..... Belief in our choices. Our choices
which preserve our children and their chances and choices. And Hope that our
forefather's choices have somehow advanced this. These choices are becoming
increasingly unraveled as we face new and untested problems.
I want to apologize to all people for being less than sociable for much of my
life. It is not that I did not want to be sociable, but being sociable forces me
to confront myself and the beauty and ugliness of it all. And that is hard. In
retrospect I have incredible admiration for those people who can be sociable and
aware at the same time. Many of my Christian friends fall into this category. I
have always admired them for their "blind" faith. Ah, ignorance is
bliss..... I have a particular gene which
I call the gene of curiousness and skepticism. It seems to be the flip side of
the purely religious gene. If you have one, you can rarely have the other. Or
you must spend your lifetime building this gene. Some of my Christian friends do
fall into this "acquired" gene trait, so that their faith is not so "blind."
This is a better kind of faith.
Ignorance certainly is a bane to all of mankind however. For better or worse, we are rocketing into the future. Those people, societies, states, cultures who can't/refuse to keep up will be left behind. If these people so choose to stay behind, then they need to stop using our cars, cell phones, computers, and especially our TVs and radios. Nobody says rocketing into the future is the best way to get there, but it seems the only free way to get there.
I have a close circle of friends whom I commune and commiserate with. We are all at once joyful, sad, cantankerous, spiteful, rebelliousness, humble and always tolerant of each other and our travails.
Update March 18, 2007.
Well, a year has passed. I have lost my Mother on Christmas day last year. She was in pain for the last years of her life, and in terrible pain for the last month. No meaning to any of this, of course. She was the fountainhead of my curiosity I do believe. Her father was a free Methodist minister, so the gene of curiosity must have been active for some generations. He obviously (?) found answers in the prevailing sentiments. God bless my Mom. You can read my eulogy to her on our wiki here. - scroll down to John's Section.
Update Dec 19, 2007.
My father passed away on October 9. My eulogy is here. - scroll down to John's section.