Words of Wisdom

I’ve always been a huge Harry Potter fan. When I was a kid, I was obsessed. I read the first four books at seven and went to midnight releases for the rest, and reread them all again and again and again. I listened to podcasts, read fanfiction, wrote for an online role playing site, and listened to wizard rock music. Easily some of my favorite experiences when I spent four months in the UK were visiting Harry Potter-related sites. I’ve read the books and seen the movies so many times I’ve lost count, and I can probably still answer just about any trivia question you might throw at me. (Just in case, major spoiler alert for the whole series in the rest of this post.)

Death is a major player in Harry Potter. Not literally, except in “The Tale of the Three Brothers” in Tales of Beedle the Bard, but thematically. Harry’s whole story started because Voldemort murdered his parents. He proceeds to lose his godfather two short ears after finding him, his greatest mentor and teacher, the pet that symbolizes his childhood and innocence, the most loyal creature friend in yet another act of sacrifice, and so many more.

And it all happens because Voldemort is afraid of death. Because he heard a prophecy once that told him, “Neither can live while the other survives.” Because as a young child, he became obsessed with the idea of being the most powerful wizard in the world and of living forever, to the extent that he was not alienated by the idea of murdering others to cast the curse that would split his soul to protect him.

Dumbledore always told Harry that Voldemort’s greatest weakness was that he was so afraid to die, and that this obsessive fear is what led him to so much evil. Dumbledore said Harry need not be afraid of death, that “To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

I didn’t have to look up that quote to remember it. It’s one of the better known ones of the books, but more importantly, it’s always resonated with me. I know in this world, being afraid of death couldn’t corrupt me into using a curse to split my soul, but regardless, based on the evidence of the books, I’ve always wholeheartedly agreed with Dumbledore that life is much more enjoyable if you aren’t trying to run from the inevitable, and instead can accept that it’s coming, and maybe even that it’s not so bad after all.

Harry visits his parents’ grave in the final book, and on their shared tombstone he sees the Scripture quote, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” He worries for a moment that this means his parents are trying to “defeat” death the way Voldemort is, trying to conquer it and live forever. But really, it means that death is coming for everyone, and it’s the last obstacle you have to face before you’re free. Alternatively, it also means that it’s the last fear you have to put to rest, one of the hardest ideas to come to terms with as you try to build yourself a well-organized mind.

The words of JK Rowling were so ingrained into my consciousness as a kid that it’s no wonder that I convinced myself early on not to be afraid of death. I didn’t lose sight of its horribleness and emotional resonance – I still cannot make it through any of the last three books without weeping, for example. But being upset by someone dying and being afraid of it are two different things. Somehow, Dumbledore’s words took root in me as a personal goal and philosophy, one that sticks with me even now.

Heaven

One day when I was in second or third grade, my Sunday school catechism teacher matter-of-factly told us that pets didn’t go to heaven because they don’t have souls. One of my friends burst into tears and cried so hard and so uncontrollably about the idea of never seeing her pets again when she died that she had to be taken out of the room for a while to get calmed down.

This is one of the things I struggle with in Catholicism. I have been a pet owner my entire life, and I’ve known and loved my pets for far longer than most people in my life. I understand conceptually what my teacher saying. We were given free will and the ability to choose to follow God because we were created in His image. This comes in the form of a soul, and it’s what separates us on a fundamental level from even the most intelligent animals; having the ability to act on something more than instinct.  Souls are the part of us that have life after death. (I don’t think any Christians are arguing against the validity of decomposition of the body, at least not within the doctrine of any denomination I know.) People who don’t believe in life after death also tend not to believe in the concept of a soul; the two go hand-in-hand.

But if heaven is paradise, how can my pets not be there? There’s little that makes me happier than fuzz therapy, a lazy afternoon playing with my cat or cuddling with my dog. Then again, how can I even begin to imagine what heaven is like? If it’s all it’s cracked up to me, I’m sure I won’t even miss animals.

…I don’t like that option very much either though.

(I thought I was here to write about pets, but I think maybe I’m here to write about heaven instead.)

I mean, the idea of heaven is absolute paradise, right? By definition, it’s one of those godly things that are so infinite and vast that humankind can’t begin to grasp what it’d be like to be in such total bliss.

I’m sitting here thinking about that and knowing that that’s supposed to be comforting, that that’s always been what kept me from being afraid of death – knowing that there’s something far better to come – but I’m realizing it’s actually pretty terrifying.

I like to know things. I hate feeling like there’s a concept I can’t grasp, to the extent where I get surly and lash out at people when they’re not explaining something in a way I feel like I can understand. Of course, accepting things you don’t know everything about is a natural part of faith. But there’s a difference between believing something after a lot of self-reflection and exploration about it, and thinking about a big empty future that we know nothing about other than its theoretical perfection.

There will be no pain, no suffering, no inequality, no poverty, no illness. None of the tragedies that plague our world in ways that seem eternal and unsolvable. But though I think I’m supposed to be excited by the idea that I’d never have to feel pain, it sort of bothers me a little bit. It’s only been in the last year or so of my life that I’ve started pushing myself to feel feelings, both in the form of being willing to talk about them with other people (and thus acknowledge that they exist), and of just letting myself cry or scream or rant or skip with joy, because I’m allowed to feel. And though I can drown in the gut-wrenching-ness of bad emotions, they also make me feel human and very alive. And when I come out on the other side, everything else feels that much sweeter.

I don’t think I like the idea of being somewhere where feelings may not exist. I want to live in a world without evil or suffering, absolutely. But I’m not quite ready to think about stopping feeling, when I’ve only just begun.

But maybe that’s just part of being young.

I think about the idea of not being human anymore, of just existing in some unknown form, of not having a mind that struggles with interpersonal relationships or insecurities or anxieties or world problems, but instead of just being ethereal and eternally peaceful and loving. I think of all time existing simultaneously in such a way that I can exist forever without ever getting bored or feeling like time is wasted.

That certainly doesn’t seem like a bad thing.

But I’m not ready yet – and that’s good. It’s terrifying that the future is unknowable. But whatever it is, if I have faith – and I do – I have to trust that it’s better than I can begin to imagine. But I don’t have to rush to get there. It’s good – healthy even - to have a little fear of it, I think. Because I want to stay here and feel feelings first. I want to laugh and cry and fall in love and have my heart broken and lose someone I love and change someone’s life and maybe have a kid someday and explore everything else out there that’s part of living.

I don’t think I’m scared of death, not really. But that doesn’t mean I’m in any hurry to get there, either. I’ve got a lot more being human to do first.

More on the pet question later.

Expressing Grief

We Scandinavians are not known for our emotive sides. I've seen my Norwegian and Finnish relatives from the Midwest in a bunch of funeral settings now and I'm always struck by how quiet it is. We don't talk. We don't wail loudly. We sit with tightly wrapped bodies and and cry politely. A lot of times I sit there wondering why I don't feel much, why it feels hollow or empty. I feel bad that I don't feel as bad as it seems I should feel.

The people that are loud or messy are generally not in control of themselves. They are the random uncle who has a serious drinking problem and shows up far enough gone that things get sloppy. It's my grandfather with serious dementia who literally can't remember what's happening and sees his own wife and falls to the ground in a cry because the experience was so surprising and sudden and horrible. It feels like we excuse these instances because they are anachronisms, because these people simple don't know or can't do better. But for those of us with sound mind and body I feel an unspoken assumption that this is gaudy. It feels self-indulgent to scream one's grief into the room. It feels weird and awkward and rude somehow. No one has ever said this to me. It just seems like I shouldn't bother anyone. It seems like things are hard enough already and we all know it's a sad time. It seems like one doesn't need to go broadcasting it to the world because it makes it about you. It seems as if unless you are so overcome with grief and emotion that you literally can't control yourself then you ought to and just process that shit internally on your own time.

That's weird, I think. 

Right? 

What is a funeral for but that moment of expressing grief and starting the process of processing? But it really feels rude somehow to get up and make a lot of noise. I remember being at a funeral for B's grandmother, a sweet and flinty woman who I met a few times, and feeling bad for crying. I thought, "Who are you to cry for this person. They aren't crying and they really knew her. Stop making this about you." 

This is possibly, nay probably, some part my own neuroses at work. And still... Why would ANYONE care if I felt sad? Why would I think anyone would judge me for feeling the loss of a person special to my special person? Thinking about it now, I cried more because those people around me - B, his mom, grandfather and sister - who I saw in pain. I cried for them because I could see that they were suffering and I because I loved them I was sad that they were feeling this way.

In this instance, it's not my place to tell people how they should express themselves (though this is sort of my job in the rest of my life). If you don't want to cry, of COURSE, you don't have to. You don't have to feel anything. But I'm betting if I feel this awkwardness about expressing sadness there are others who feel this way too. What is it about our culture that invisibly tells us that we shouldn't express these things publicly? Why do these visible emotions make us so freaked out? Isn't the whole point of a funeral to give us a ritual space to do this in?

I found this video series recently called "Ask a Mortician" and in it she talks about exactly this subject. Ironically, there's an early questions that she reads from a viewer about a co-worker who loses a baby to miscarriage and then says nothing because she doesn't want to say the wrong thing. I have had EXACTLY this experience and did EXACTLY the same thing. It was interesting to hear the advice and think about if I could follow it myself in the real world. 

I went and looked up the "professional mourner" that the video mentions. I also found a bit of video of one of these ceremonies.

As I was watching this with its unabashed theatricality and heightened emotional performativity all I could think of was theater. We go to plays, we watch movies, we read books, we listen to music that are insanely depressing and epic in their description and experience of grief. We love a Romeo and Juliet tragedy and the intentionally overwrought emotions it gives us. Perhaps we crave exactly this kind of weeping and wailing in our lives because it gives us permission to feel intensely in this way. Culturally we are allowed to wallow in the depth of a romantic break up (at least for a little while). There is so much music and pop culture devoted to the intensity of this feeling. Is it possible that having an outlet for an experience so much more intense might also need such a freeing outlet? Might it help us get through the experience by having a moment to really dive in and let out those feelings rather that keeping them tightly held and able to fester?

I love this idea in spirit. I wonder if I would be able to do it in practice....

Things to chew on.

Right-to-Die

A couple days ago, I stumbled into a conversation with a very close friend about assisted suicide. He expressed very adamantly and deliberately that he believes that if people don’t want to live, they should have the right to choose to die.

This hit me so much by surprise that I didn’t even know how to answer at first. I’ve had a couple friends who have come very close to suicide due to depression, and the idea that it’s okay for people to just end their lives seemed totally alien.

But no, that’s not what B meant. In some places/countries, he explained, there are assisted suicide programs where people can go through counseling and, if they are declared mentally sane/stable and want to die, they are issued a drug cocktail allowing them to do so. It’s wrong to murder and to end someone else’s life, but if you want to die, he says, you should be able to make that choice for yourself. And, he argued, it’s better to kill yourself with the aid of counseling to make sure it’s what you want with your family knowing and understanding your decision-making process, than to shoot yourself in the head.

Still. It feels fundamentally wrong to me on every level that anyone should take their own life. It feels like playing God to just eject yourself from the world because you no longer enjoy your presence there. I wholeheartedly believe in free will and individual rights, but there’s something about an action that extinguishes your very lifeblood… People can try to get pregnant, but they cannot actively control the creation of life, and to me it feels like the opposite bookend of that should be true too.

But I have no reason to believe, that I’d ever want to end my own life (assuming freedom from mental illness). B, on the other hand, has muscular dystrophy. He used to be an excellent piano player, and now has so little control of his fingers that he carries a tool to help him open soda/beer cans. Multiple times he has broken a foot and barely even noticed, because he can’t feel it. The older he gets, the more his body will deteriorate. He’ll likely be confined to a wheelchair before long, and eventually maybe be unable to move at all. He’s had friends die at twelve years old because of more extreme forms of his disease. He’s seen relationships in his family be torn apart from the strain of one spouse being so completely dependent on the other for care.

He’s happy now, enjoying life, still able to do many things that he loves and to lead a relatively normal life. But he never plans to get married, because he doesn’t want to end up in a broken relationship that makes someone suffer the burden of taking care of him every day of their lives. And he can easily imagine a time in his 40s or 50s when he would rather die than continue living a life of constant pain, unable to carry out many jobs (regardless of disability laws), and completely reliant on other people to function.

I can’t imagine wanting to die. But I also can’t imagine a life knowing that that’s my future. And it’s hard to argue with someone who has no other future to consider.

I couldn’t help doing a little research about the whole assisted suicide concept, because I had no idea it was even an option in some places. In the US, there are five states where terminally ill, mentally competent patients with less than six months to live can request a prescription for life-ending medication. Other countries have even looser laws, permitting not just assisted suicide but euthanasia. In Belgium, doctors can help patients end their lives when they “freely express a wish to die because they are suffering intractable and unbearable pain.”

Even where it’s illegal, right-to-die groups still offer ways to carry out assisted suicide. Organizations such as Compassion & Choices and Final Exit Network let people sign up for suicide cocktails by mail. They are sent exactly what they will need, with specific instructions for how to use it – including orders for family members to destroy the instructions after the plan has been carried out.

Even thinking about this makes my breathing uneven and my heart beat out of rhythm. I watched a video clip from a PBS documentary of a family member matter-of-factly explaining the pills her relative was taking – first anti-anxiety and anti-nausea ones in preparation for diving into the lethal dose of 60 pills in fifteen minutes. She was so calm and matter-of-fact about the idea of someone she loved just ending her life.

I could barely breathe.

I’m blessed to be physically and mentally healthy. Maybe being resistant to death is a sign of that, and maybe that makes it sort of a good sign that society as a whole is as afraid of death as most people are. Because the opposite of a fear of death is even more alarming - hearing B talk with complete ease about wanting to die in what we usually consider middle age, “the prime of life,” before his disease gets to be too much to bear. I guess if life means something different to you, death does too.

Anesthesia

The closest thing to death I can imagine is the experience of going under in an anesthesia induced sleep.

My senior year of high school I got my wisdom teeth taken out. I don't think it was ever an option to stay awake through the surgery but I imagine that even if it was I would have opted to go under. At the time I couldn't imagine anything worse than being conscious through some horrific ordeal where I felt - however out of it - some aspect of someone cutting into my body to remove something.

I remember the oral surgeon's chair. I remember the giant smock they place over top of me. I vaguely remember a mask, I think it was a mask, and being told to count backwards towards one. I remember thinking that I would have no idea what to do when I got to one. I remember thinking about how I would get there soon.

And then.

I woke up.

But when I say I woke up it's hard to convey the way in which this was different than any other kind of waking up I've ever experienced. I rose out of the deepest kind of darkness. It felt like coming into being. It felt like my brain had to realize what consciousness was as if for the very first time. I cannot say for sure, because of course I don't know, but I imagine this is what it would be like to come back from the dead.

I didn't know before having this experience that sleep is not actually dead to the world. I didn't realize that even when we slip away at night so much of our body's sensors are still whirring and purring and quietly feeding us information. When we sleep some part of us senses the passage of time. Some inner compass gives us a bit of info about the placement of our body. Somewhere deep inside our dreaming brains that sense of "I" still floats around.

But I know all that now and I know it because the one thing that I fully remember about that experience was what it was like to wake up having lost every one of those things. My body had been moved and I was in a new place but I had no sense of having traversed space. I spent a full minute just trying to understand the space around me, so total was my sense of still remaining just where my consciousness had left off. Normally when I think of the shift from dream to awake I sense my mind coming from one kind of place and into another. When I woke up from surgery I came from a kind of darkness that was total. No dreams. No sense of self. Nothing.

Upon waking I "was" again.

But I also now understood what it would be like if I wasn't. 

In that surgery sleep I wasn't dreaming. I wasn't aware anymore. I was no where. It felt like I hadn't been alive.

And ever since then I've assumed that this must be what death is like. It isn't some horrible dark and scary place. It isn't anything. It's just a lack. It's just nothing.

So in one way, there's nothing to be scared of.  Death is not me thinking about a lack of consciousness. There's no me to think. There's no thinking to occur. There's only that lack. There's only that nothing. But since that experience I am far more afraid of dying. Soon after having my wisdom teeth out I developed an intense fear of flying. Stepping onto a plane somehow brought me close to that feeling of nothing. As if the only thing separating me from the nothing was miles of air.

Rationally, I know this is a silly and useless fear. I understand that I am far more likely to die in a car or from heart disease. But when I am forced to sit still and contemplate the space between me and the ground I start to panic. When a possible path towards the nothing is so obvious, when human brazenness is so brash that I realize it has caused me to hurtle through space in a metal box high in the sky, I have a hard time telling those voices to quiet. When the memory of how quickly one can lose everything they know to be themselves has nowhere to go it can claw its way up the edges of the rational self. When the memory finds a home in my mind and my heart and my gut it laughs and reminds me that the nothing can swallow me.

So instead I try to distract myself with books and music. I try to breathe and feel my body living in the seat I occupy. I tell myself that today is not the day I will lose myself.

And I try not to remember the feeling of feeling nothing at all.

The Santa Claus effect

My parents and I aren’t the best at talking to each other.

I love them. They are hard-working and driven and fun and goofy and supportive and generous, in different times and in different measures. We fight sometimes, especially my dad and me, but never anything serious or lasting.

I’ve always seen the good and the bad in them, even as a child. I’ve always known my dad was overworked and overtired and took his stress out on us with his bad moods, constantly on the verge of shouting. I’ve also always known that when we visit a bookstore, it takes next-to-convincing on my part for him to offer to buy me the stack of books I show up carrying two hours later after I dive in full-throttle to browse my favorite sections. I’ve gotten frustrated with my mom for never fully grasping what I do in theatre even when I’ve explained it to her a hundred times, but I also know she supports me anyway, as she came to see every production I worked on, even when she didn’t really understand what I’d done for it.

But we don’t talk about our feelings. I didn’t tell my mom when my friends subtly edged me out of their group in sixth grade, and my dad didn’t get to tease me about crushes I never told him I had. I have trouble picking out Hallmark cards for holidays because even someone else’s words feel too cheesy and syrupy for us. Now, every once in a blue moon, my mom sends me a Facebook message with a cute saying about how much her daughter means to her. I appreciate the gesture, and I know she means every word, but for some reason it puts me on edge.

I like it better when she sends me videos of hedgehogs.

We’ve discussed it occasionally. How impressed I was when I realized how open and communicative my sister is, when the rest of us tend to keep things pretty tight to ourselves. How my mom wishes I shared more with her, but how I don’t really know how to when for so many years she didn’t ask me about what was troubling me – not because she didn’t care or notice, I know now, but because she didn’t know how to and hoped I’d talk about it myself. Instead, in most cases we learned to show our feelings and our moods through our actions, and that was plenty for me.

All of which is to say that the idea of talking to my parents about their deaths is not only uncomfortable and upsetting, but downright terrifying verging on impossible.

I have a pretty specific idea of what it would mean for me to die, or (perhaps bizarrely) even to lose my closest friends. But while my parents’ deaths are theoretically more imminent, assuming we all die of old age (or age-related illness), the idea of their steady presence being gone is unthinkable.

I don’t know what they want. I don’t know if they’d sign a DNR in the hospital, if they’d want to be in nursing homes or cared for at home, if they want to buried or cremated. I could take a pretty solid guess, because I’ve known them my whole life. But I’ve never asked.

It’s like how we all continue to say our Christmas gifts come from Santa Claus, so I can maintain the magic of Christmas and feel like a child again… If I don’t talk to my parents about dying, they never will.

Of course this is absurd and untrue and I know rationally that I should know the answers to the death questions, that they deserve that my siblings and I have the knowledge to take care of them as they would want.

But Naomi’s the oldest, and she’s always been more open to tough conversations. Can’t she just ask all the questions?

Observation: I’m having trouble getting my thoughts organized enough to write this, much more so than usual. I keep feeling like I’m pulled in a lot of different directions, like there’s so much to say or explain and no way to say it. After writing the last sentence above, I feel like the “right thing to do” is realize that letting someone else take responsibility is childish and immature. But at the same time, I actually think it’s very practical – my sister is more family-oriented and much older (fourteen years) and wiser to the ways of the world than I am. If anything were to happen to our parents, even though I live the closest, she’d probably be the one to organize everything that had to be done. Or at least, she would know what had to be done, and she would tell me what I need to know to make it happen logistically.

In most areas of my life, I work hard to be a “real adult,” to convince other people (and more importantly, myself) that I know what I’m doing and I can handle everything.

But if you ask me to have an adult conversation with my parents about their deaths, I might just throw a temper tantrum.

We’ve always been “actions speak louder than words” type people.

That’s okay, right? Right?

Legacy

A couple years ago, my friend and I found an old-fashioned wooden blanket trunk at a flea market, which my friend was immediately excited about purchasing for her room. When we opened it to see if there was anything inside, I was even more fascinated by the contents: layers upon layers of photographs, letters, drawings, and documents, all of which looked old and faded.

We rifled through the documents, quickly ascertaining that they belonged to no one we’d ever heard of. But we went ahead and purchased the trunk together with its contents and lugged the hefty forty-pound trunk the two miles back to my apartment, from Clark Park, in the rain.

Later that night, after a performance of our show, we found ourselves back in my living room, digging through the magical box of history. We organized it by type of artifact, and then used the captions and text to start putting pieces together, following the trail of relationships, family members, and timelines. We hopped on the computer and searched recurring names to see if we could find the people today to return things too. Eve was obsessed with the idea of making a reddit to see if the internet hive mind could hunt people down, but I didn’t care much about that part – I just wanted to understand people’s stories, as much as I could from these small windows into their lives.

Birth announcement, Baptism announcement, and young adulthood of Carol Ann Darnell

It shouldn’t have been a surprise when, two years later, I ended up following a similar course for my undergraduate senior project in creating an archival history of the Drexel Players. I spent many long hours reading old newspaper articles, rifling through a delicate scrapbooks from decades past, scouring playbills for names and juicy director’s notes, and taking notes on every college yearbook ever published, all to frame a story that had been largely lost from memory in the intervening years.

I’ve never been able to explain why projects like these draw me in so much. With the Players, it was easy to use the excuse that learning about our history might inspire ideas for us for the future. But with the trunk I had no such excuse. And in both cases, it was more for my own interests than for any such lofty reason; I was fascinated by finding the same names again and again, by charting the course of individuals through time and in learning something of who they were and what they did.

I think, if I’m honest with myself, I’m drawn to other people’s histories because I hope someone else will be drawn to mine.

I try my best to make it easy for them. I’ve scrapbooked for years, created photobooks of trips and special events, and saved the programs and posters of every show or project I’ve worked on. I religiously ensure that someone, whether it’s me or not, is taking photos of important events. When I carefully upload, tag, and caption all my photos on Facebook, it’s not in hopes that I’ll get hundreds of “likes” to create a shiny happy picture of my life; it’s to create a detailed catalog of my life. I love handwritten letters, and I still print hard copies of photos so there’s physical evidence of my story too.

I like to think that doing these things is just the right trail of breadcrumbs for someone to follow in the future. Ideally, of course, my family and friends will keep and treasure these memories. But even if they don’t,  I have a romantic vision that no matter who I am or become, someone somewhere will find a bin of my belongings at a flea market someday and think it’s worth staying up til 3 in the morning trying to piece together who I am, or who I was. I like to think even if I’m not famous or well-known, that my legacy will live on somewhere, somehow.

The line

A few weeks ago there was a circulating rumor online that the photos of Sandra Bland in her mugshot were actually photos of a dead woman.

I stared a lot at those pictures trying to see if I could tell the truth. It frightens me that it is so hard to tell.

We talk about death as if it is a definitive moment. As if there is a specific and clear ending when it is obviously, officially, over. Yet, in my experience of it, it seems a much more gradual process. Perhaps there is some line that once crossed we cannot return from but there are also a million tiny ones before that usher us to the end. I think of my grandfather in his final years and how so much of who and what he was had gone. My grandfather, whip smart and organized, a money man at Honeywell, moving all his money into a checking account for no reason we could discern. This was when we took away the control of his finances.

My grandfather seemed like himself for a long time. It was a slow realization that his stories seemed to repeat himself. There was the summer he kept commenting on the peach pie, over and over with the same exclamation of, "Peach Pie! I think I'll take a slice of that." Each time exactly the same and then followed with a story of his childhood.

Later when Brad's father died and he didn't make it to Christmas with me Grandpa Mackey asked me what had happened to "the fellow." With somber voice I told him that Brad was at home with his mom because it would be her first holiday alone. An hour later Grandpa looked around and asked the question again and I replied with the same answer. Again and again we went through this exchange, each time the same, at least four or five more times that week.

When my grandmother died we went to the funeral and I watched as again and again my grandfather slowly realized where he was and what had happened. Each time he wailed it seemed to happen for the very first time.

By the time we'd moved him out of his house and into the assisted nursing facility, it seemed like so much of him was gone. There was an element of his humor and cadence when he proclaimed to my mother that the facility's cafeteria was a restaurant he'd loved for years. But there was equally much an absence. It seemed like so much of who he was had already left.

When he went into the ER for pneumonia my mother called and told me about the gory feeling of the doctors re-animating a body that just wanted to go. She said that it seemed so painful. She said that she felt horrible. She said she wished that hadn't done it. When the pneumonia came back she called again as she sat and wait for hours then days for him to stop breathing. She said it felt like eons from the inhale to the exhale, waiting for it to finally stop.

When can you tell that someone has died? Is that final moment really the end? Or has it started so much earlier? Is it simply an arbitrary point on a long continuing line?

Light in the dark

(a continuation of my last post, "Emily was")

I hadn’t seen the girls from Edinburgh altogether in two years. It was the kind of thing where we were very close for a very specific reason – living, working, and playing together in one flat for a month can do that to you – but when we went home, we returned to our own lives. We still overlapped, of course – one of the girls was heavily involved with theatre and lived across the hall from me in my apartment building, two were in my year and major and did all my group projects with me, two others were sorority sisters, and so on. But while now and then we’d talk about having a reunion, we were always too many people with too widely varied lives to actually make it happen.

A couple weeks after I got the news about Emily, one of the girls posted in our long-neglected Facebook group asking if we all wanted to get dinner sometime. No one said it was because of Emily, but if it weren’t for her I can’t imagine the responses checking back in and compromising on scheduling would have been so ready and willing. We all seemed to feel the same need to see each other and process our connection to Emily’s death. Other than one girl who was away working in New York, we’d all be there.

We decided to do a late dinner at a Mexican restaurant on a Sunday night, in honor of Emily’s erstwhile dedication to finding good Mexican food in Scotland. By the time 8 PM rolled around, I really didn’t want to go. I’d had one of the most socially exhausting weekends I’d ever had, over the course of which I’d had to be every different version of myself for all my different social and professional groups. I walked there thinking – guiltily – that the last thing I wanted to do was think about death and have my mood and energy lowered even further.

But it wasn’t like that. There was something really special about just being back together. We’d all grown a lot in two years, and we were able to dive easily into conversation, telling each other about our lives and plans and adventures since we’d seen each other last. Everyone had so much to tell, and there was something unique about sharing stories with people who knew each other so well in some ways, but hardly at all in others.

It wasn’t until after we’d finished the main meal, and were looking into drinks and desserts, that we finally talked about Emily. I don’t know how it came up – if someone said they wished she were there, or if we started talking about Edinburgh and it seemed natural – but suddenly the topic had been broached, and we were there, talking about her. I don’t know if it was me or someone else, but someone expressed what I kept saying, how strange it felt for us to mourn her when so many people had it far harder than we did. But the great thing was that there, in that moment with them, we were all on the same level, and for once I didn’t have to try to explain the context of my loss. Everyone there understood.

Well, not all of us were on the same level. Emily had gotten closer to one of us than the rest, and the two of them stayed close and continued to spend time together as often as they could over the past two years.

I’d deduced through Instagram that J had seen Emily in Spain on one of her last days, but I hadn’t realized until we all started talking about how we’d heard the news that they had been together the morning Emily got on that plane. J was flying back to the States after visiting Barcelona at the end of her study abroad term in Rome. Emily’s plane went down over the Alps sometime during the first leg of J’s flight, but Heathrow was blocking all news carrying the story, so she heard nothing about the event even on her six-hour layover. It wasn’t until she landed in the States hours later and had a Facebook message from one of Emily’s other friends that J even knew something was wrong, and the rest fell out from there.

After this story, the conversation moved on and others continued to talk about their emotions and experiences. But I could tell J was still thinking, dwelling, and since she was sitting next to me I was able to have a quiet side conversation with her.

“Why was she in Barcelona, anyway?”

“She came to visit me.”

Oh. Woah. J explained that Emily and her mom had made plans to take their vacation through several places in Europe, and had agreed to meet up with J in Barcelona when they realized their travel dates lined up perfectly. Then the Selkes had booked their seat on the budget Germanwings flight, going on to the next leg of their trip as J headed home.

“If it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t have been in Barcelona at all.”

She didn’t say it, but I could tell she was thinking it, so I answer the unspoken thought, “…It’s not your fault.”

“I know. I know. But…” Again, the words didn’t have to be said. It feels like it sometimes.

Out of nowhere, J – one of the steadiest, goofiest people I know – was crying. I hugged her, trying to provide some measure of comfort. It distracted the others from their conversation, and they asked if she was okay. I felt guilty, as if I had drawn attention to her that she might not have wanted from everyone.

I don’t know why grief hits us in the way that it does. I don’t know how the few extra experiences they had together kept J and Emily so close, even though they were infrequent since Emily had graduated and moved to Pittsburgh. I don’t know why I suddenly felt so guilty as we all sat there and talked about how terrible the media response to the event was, as if we were the insensitive ones, ignoring our own friend and her greater level of grief.

But despite all that, it wasn’t a sad night, really. This isn’t about that. It’s the opposite, the odd and contradictory joy of the whole occasion. As we were paying the bill, someone said, “I’m sorry it had to be because of this… But I’m really glad we all got together again.”

It’s true. Death takes away a person, leaves a hole of some sort, whether it’s a gaping one in your everyday life or a small confused one in your memories. But it can also bring people closer together. Like when my friend in the van on the way back from Kentucky responded to the news by saying how much she cared about all of us. And like how eight girls put aside their crazy schedules for the first time in two years because losing one of our number made us realize how much we still cared about our memories and wanted to support each other.

I can’t say it made figuring out how I felt about Emily’s death any easier, and we haven’t all gotten together again since that night. But I do know that it’s not always about doom and gloom. Sometimes the dark moments are the ones that help you find the light.

Letting go

A friend of mine recently decided to become a priest.

And somehow that feels like dying.

I do not mean to say this in a way that is negative. I don't mean that he's dead to me or anything like that. It's simply that in making this huge life change it strikes me that he is giving up so many of the things that I understand as motivators to move through and be in the world.

This friend and I met in high school, in a camp for theater where we ended up in the same group. We studied scenes and created motivations and we dug into the minutiae of acting in the hopes of finding some deeper kind of truth about art and life. At least, that's what it felt like at 16.

This friend and I had a funny kind of chemistry. We spent a lot of time together that summer and there was a kind of kinship of understanding that I sensed. Underneath social dynamics and classroom abilities was some deeper need to make sense of the world through the art we were making. That seeking was the thing in my friend that I valued. It was the aspect, more than any acting ability, that made me want to know him in the program.

Years later I remember sitting in a hotel room in Virginia. I was working sound on a touring production for a relatively big name theater company and happened to take a show to his alma mater. He was across the country working for a very very big name media company. I had stuck with the stage in the intervening years. He moved on to more technological artistic pursuits.

"Theater is a dead medium," he said. Or typed rather. We chatted online and not over the phone.

"No it's not. You are just seeing the wrong stuff!"

This is the tenor of hours of back and forth that ensued.

I wish I had a transcript of those conversations still saved. I would love to see my fervent and completely unironic belief in the power of theater. It was so clear, so genuine, so unquestioning then.

"Whatever, I think you're wrong but if you want to hitch your wagon to that train, be my guest,"  he said.

At least this is what I remember him saying. Something to that effect.

"I will prove you wrong," said I.

Or something like that.

Years later, he in a job with a 95% retention rate ("Happy people never leave," he said, or something like it) and I about to embark on my largest project ever, we met again in person. I don't even really remember how it happened. Was he visiting Philly anyway? How did I decide that I wanted someone with that expertise to come in to the very beginning of our rehearsals and offer some perspective from a  different artistic medium? I know that he stayed with me and I remember his car window breaking and the two of us going to the Home Depot for find plexiglass to seal it for the drive back to DC.

Months later than this he returned and like a giddy kid ran through my performance ensuring he'd found every version of the choose your own adventure play we'd been able to offer. He seemed to like it almost more than I could. I was so aware of the flaws I couldn't see the larger whole but for the sum of its imperfect parts.  In my memory we have a conversation about how I'd done it, how I'd actually proved that theater wasn't dead, that it just needed to be something like the play he, in a small but important way, had helped to make possible.

Maybe that happened. Maybe I just made it up.

On facebook years later again I remember noticing him announce a move across the coast and wondering about it. I remember wondering why a happy person would ever leave.

Once in a while he'd post something and I'd send a comment. Once in a while I'd write a blog post and he'd respond. Once in a while I'd ask for advice about something in his field or he'd mention a show that he'd seen. Somehow through the lightest kind of contact we managed to stay connected across time and space.

And also, somehow, it seemed that both of us began to seem a little tired. Both of us seemed a little discontent. I began to wonder if despite all my early protestations that perhaps he hadn't been right all along, that I had in fact hitched my horse to a dying wagon that no one wanted to ride. That I was simply delaying the inevitable. I began to wonder if maybe I just took longer than everyone else to wake up and realize what was obvious. And I began to look deeper into the field that he had chosen. It began to interest me more. That spark from the small piece we had worked on together ignited further.

But when we recently got in touch again, it seemed that he was tired too. That just as I began to see possibility in this new direction, he had decided that he might get off this path as well. It felt like I was once again chasing behind yelling "No no! Seriously. There's something here, I know it."

So when I heard this friend had decided to give all that up, give up all the chasing and trying and working to make meaning out of making, when I heard that he had decided to give away everything he owned, and all the constraints of the world that it seemed I was still bound to, when he was able to make such a brave choice to change literally everything about the world he knew to take a stab at something bigger... it felt a little bit like something dying. It felt like he had moved on to something I would never know. It made me jealous, in a way, that a person who had been akin in this way could simply move on to something else. That they could find deeper meaning in other places. That they could sense the lessening of reward and seek out something more fulfilling. That they had something in their life like this to pursue.

I watch from online afar as things are given away. I watch as possessions are passed on.

I think, "It looks so light."

I think, "It looks so free."

What would it be like to let go?

And somehow it feels like dying. And it's hard to explain exactly why.

Things in my life that I remember dying, roughly in order:

- My father's father
- My mother's grandmother
- My mother's other grandmother
- A kitten named Diva (hit by a car)
- The class rabbit Thumper (in our backyard while we had him at home for the summer)
- A caterpillar we wanted to grow into a butterfly
- Another kitten named Diva (sick when we got her)
- Two girls from my middle school killed in a fire (we sang a song for them in the fall choir concert)
- Two green anole lizards whose names I don't remember
- A frog
- Several fish
- A cage of gerbils
- A mouse
- A boy from my high school (committed suicide)
- My iguana Iggy
- The plants in my college dorm room
- A girl from my college (car accident)
- My childhood cat Koko
- My childhood dog Barkley
- The plants in my first apartment
- My childhood cat Jojo
- The plants I planted in my south Philly backyard
- My partner's father
- My partner's grandmother
- My partner's childhood cat Mandu
- My partner and I's cat Talula
- My childhood cat Bill
- My mother's mother
- My partner's grandfather
- My father's mother
- My mother's father
- My mother's sister

I remember only a few funerals, strangely many of them in the same room.

Just outside that room are couches that face each other with a cheap wood table between them bearing magazines about Minnesota and small packets of tissues.

The room itself is beige with a slight orange tint. There are lifesaver mints everywhere, which I always find simultaneously strange and useful. The door enters in from what I believe is the south and west corner of the room. On the right is a small shelf and display area upon which rests a book one can sign. Next to that usually sits a pile of small cards with a name and small quote.

To the left of the door is a table covered in cloth. It either holds a book with photos or sits empty next to an easeled picture board with pins pushing into the surface.

The chairs, I think, are pink and gold and are lined up evenly with backs to those who enter. They are facing the dais and podium which seem to made of the same material as the table in the sofa-ed room just previous. There is a microphone on the lectern though it is usually poorly used and in my memory I never hear voices amplified.

Sometimes there is a coffin. If so, there is also a body. In all cases this is the strangest, weirdest, hardest moment.

In the place of the coffin there may instead be a small white box.

There is carpet on the floor and flowers up in front. The colors change but they feel the same.

There is some amount of sitting and hugging and talking. I mention things about my life to people I so rarely see and they nod and raise their eyebrows and shrug their shoulders. "Well that is very interesting, indeed," is the tenor of most of these conversations.

There are promises that this must not be the only time we see each other.

There are quiet moments of hanging coats on hooks and breathing in and out. There are contortions when one sits not to face directly front.

Sometimes there is slipping out the door and back into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and powdered creamer.

Afterwards in the car on the way to outdoors place there is usually a reflection on how unreal it all feels. That feeling never quite dissipates even when it is punctuated with something else much heavier.

Emily was

I was sitting in the back row of a rental van, enjoying upbeat road trip music and the laughter of my friends as we settled into our twelve hour drive back from a week-long service trip in Kentucky. For the first time in over a week, I opened the social media applications on my phone, feeling bittersweet about being able to reconnect with the rest of my life, but also hating no longer having the excuse of no cell service or wi-fi to not have to be constantly accessible.

Emails, Instagram posts, links shared, Facebook messages. I clicked and read and replied. Then, a post in a US to Edinburgh Facebook group from the professor I’d traveled to Scotland with two years before. A picture of one of the girls I’d traveled with, and a link to an article, with some headline about her passion for performing arts festivals and general joy for life.

That’s nice, I thought. I wonder why she had an article written about her? Absentmindedly, I clicked the link, figuring she must have made some exciting new career move or something.

As soon as I started skimming the article, something felt off.

The picture was from our trip to Edinburgh two years before. The story shared information I already knew about her career path and accomplishments.

And then, the most glaring sign: “Emily Selke was…”

My breath caught in my throat. It had to be a mistake. The voices of my friends in the van around me suddenly felt distorted, as if I was hearing them from the long end of a tunnel. I wasn’t sure how they could be going on while I was uncovering something so overwhelming.

I left the article tab and, as I was about to search for more information, saw a notification for a photo I was tagged. I clicked. A photo of Emily, two friends, and I on a cliff overlooking Stirling Castle. A caption from one of the girls about the joy Emily brought to all of our experiences there, a list of memories, a note about how short a time we knew each other, but how special it was.

None of this made sense.

Finally, I found a news article. “Germanwings crash.” “3 Americans found dead.” “Yvonne and Emily Selke identified.” It’d been a tiny budget airline, flying over the Alps from Spain. They’d been only two of three Americans on board. No one knew the cause of the crash yet.

As if from a great distance away, I suddenly remembered getting a text message in a rare moment of service in the Kentucky mountains earlier that week. A good friend in my major, but someone I wouldn’t have expected to hear from over spring break. “I’ve been trying to call you, but I just remembered you’re on ASB… Hope you’re having fun!” I remembered thinking it was weird that she’d tried to call me. We didn’t talk on the phone. I’d shrugged it off, figuring it was something to do with grades or next quarter’s classes.

Now I knew otherwise now. She’d tried to call me, tried to tell me. When she couldn’t reach me by phone, she hadn’t wanted to say it in a text. She let me enjoy my spring break without this overwhelming news being delivered with impersonal, typed words on a screen.

So instead, I found out through social media.

I texted her immediately. Despite the photos, the articles, the posts, I couldn’t quite believe it until I heard it from someone else who knew her. She texted me back almost immediately. Yes, she’d tried to tell me before. Yes, it was true. No, she didn’t know how to react either…

What do you do with the death of someone you haven’t seen in two years, but who you once lived with in very close quarters for a very impactful month?

What right did I have to grieve, when her dad had lost both wife and daughter? When her long-term boyfriend had lost the woman he planned to spend the rest of his life with?

Unbidden, memories sprang to mind. Emily the level-headed one, dryly providing sassy contributions to all our conversations. Emily staying in working on assignments while the rest of us went out to bars, prioritizing the work she’d come there to do. Emily’s perpetual hunt for a good Mexican restaurant somewhere, anywhere, in Edinburgh. Emily insisting on walking from the train station to our flat with her massive suitcases, even when she got lost multiple times and it took her two hours. Emily’s joy and anticipation about her mother coming to visit at the end of our month. Emily ordering a massive flaming cauldron cocktail on our last night altogether, and refusing to share a single sip.

Around me, still, my carmates chattered and laughed, half of them likewise checking their phones for the first time all week. No one there knew Emily. No one seemed to realize that my whole world had shifted in the last twenty minutes I’d spent looking at the little screen.

Suddenly, I had to say something. I couldn’t bear the sound of their laughter. I couldn’t take it alone. “Guys,” I said. My voice came out a little stilted, quiet. “Guys, my friend… Someone I went to Edinburgh with… She and her mom just died. In a plane crash.”

No one knew what to say. I’d been selfish, really, in my desperate need to get it outside myself, to make someone else to shoulder the burden. I needed to be allowed to have feelings about this, and to say it out loud rather than containing it all in the tiny glowing rectangle in the palm of my hand.

They all asked me if I was okay. Someone said, “I just want all of you to know how much you mean to me.” We all expressed agreement.

Finally, because I was traveling with a Newman group, someone offered what I wanted, what I needed, the only tool we had in that moment: prayer. We joined hands as best we could around the car, someone asked me a couple questions for details, and we prayed, for them and their passage, and for the family and friends they left behind.

Slowly, conversations resumed around me, but they stayed quiet and calm for the time being.

Shortly after, we stopped at a gas station and met up with the people in our group’s other van inside when we all climbed out to use the restroom. Like my friends had been before I spoke up, they were talking and joking loudly, and my carmates used their ignorance as the invitation to break out of the funk I’d dragged them down into.

I came out of the bathroom and asked a friend for a hug, and she was only too happy to give it in between joking around with someone else. I didn’t say anything to anyone from the other van.

Then, I climbed back into back row nest, and decided all I could do for the moment was to put a smile back on and shove the whole situation from my mind. Emily was a meaningful part of my life for a very short time, but I hadn’t seen her in two years. In the meantime, I had only a few hours left to spend in such close quarters bonding with a group of people who were really special to me, who were alive and present and who deserved my attention and love.

I’d figure out how to mourn later.

The end of potential

Sometimes late at night I wake up and my heart is racing. It feels like a hand is holding my soul high up in my throat. It feels at this moment that it could simply fly away. That the membrane between what is living in me and the body that will remain when it is gone is so thin that it could slip though. It makes me want to cry. I feel like something large and dark is about to take over me. I know that I need to push it back, push it down, hold the living in or I will be consumed by nothingness.

In these moments late at night I am keenly aware that I will die.

The consciousness of this, the knowledge that some day I will no longer be, is a dark thing. It sideswipes me in moments of still and quiet. Standing at the sink drying dishes a sensation will pass through me and I suddenly, incontrovertibly, impossibly fully understand my own mortality. I will know it in a way that feels old and forever and it makes me want to cry. It feels like it is expanding and unfurling like a million tiny insects swarming away from me and I will never be able to catch and contain them all again.

And then just as quickly I am standing feeling the echo of the deepest kind of sadness and drying a dish. The darkness is somehow reigned in. But I can sense it will return again without warning.

As I type this I cannot quite grasp it, or rather I have too much control to let it free. In the warm and fading light of day I am too settled and centered for it to paralyze, run through and over me. Even as I try to recall the pressure in my chest and the rising panic and clutching of my throat I can feel the instinctual muscle that wrestles it down.

As a child I used to have panic attacks about infinity. They felt exactly the same.

I remember the sensation of my younger mind trying to hold the idea of an infinite universe. The looping expanses of space twirling and unspooling would slip past the bonds of my brain's ability to conceive, my desire to know and form a boundary around the concept the very limitation that prevented me from fully understanding it.

I felt this tug of war then, the need to know something fundamentally unknowable.

       I feel it now in my desire to tangibly feel a loss of my own understanding.

            Will it hurt when I no longer know that I am?

                 Will I feel the lack of being?

                         I don't think so.

                              I don't think so.

And this is harder somehow. Because I cannot grasp the nothing.

I just keep trying to understand

      how can it be that everything around me
                                                                will just
                                                                         go on...

                                                                              And that I.... 
                                                                                         will  not.
       
                                                           I will just end.

                                                                     And when I end that will be it.

I don't believe that I really feel death yet. It is still too abstract a thing. It creeps up in strange flashes of hypochondria about a mole or a bump. I think about it idly as a definitive ending of a storyline between a romantic lover or turn in the events of my life in regards to a friend. In this way it is dramatic but unreal, like an idea of a story line or the loss of a character's plot and development, but it isn't palpable and close and real.

I have lost some people, but they are people who were a long time in the losing. Grandparents already fondly thought of in the distance. People I loved in ideology more than in the present tense. I cried for them, for the hollowness these bodies contained, but I did not (do not) wholly understand the gravity of the loss.

What I do feel is the fear of wasting time.

I fear missing out. I fear having lost my chance. I fear that by picking one path I will have made a mistake. It oddly holds me in place, this indecisiveness, afraid to lose what I have. I worry it will go without my realizing. Something deep in me believes I must look at all the things that surround me to ensure they haven't gone away without my knowing.

I cannot look at this fear directly. When I name it, it becomes small, silly, trite. But it continues its gentle hold on me and it feels as if it too comes from the dark place at night that wakes me with a hand around my throat. I want to see its eyes. I want to hold it by the shoulders and shake. I want to let it know that I am in charge and I believe in myself and that I do not let it convince me to doubt my choices. I want these things and I fear they are not true.

I fear that at the end of it I will wonder what I have done with my life.

I fear that I will wonder what it all was for.

I fear that I will have regrets.

I fear that I will have lost something beautiful.

I fear that I will know the answers when it's too late.

I fear this.

But I still can't quite wrap my mind around the answers, that beautiful looping symbol keeps slipping out of my grasp and the darkness of un-being continues to hold me in a tight embrace that I cannot hide from at night.

Infinity and Death!

I want to talk to you.

I want you to answer me.

I want to make you knowable.

I want you to tell me it will be ok.



Please.



Please.



Please.

The Faith Component

I have trouble talking to other people about my thoughts and feelings about death for the same reason I have trouble talking about sexual expression and abortion and a lot of the other hot topics in society: my perspective is intricately interwoven with my faith and understanding of it.  

This is complicated for a lot of reasons: first, having opinions informed by Catholicism does not, at least in my case, mean that I agree 100% with all the Church’s teachings (spoiler: I don’t). But I wouldn’t be a practicing Catholic by now if I didn’t get a lot more good than bad out of what the Catholic Church teaches and how that affects how I live my life. But whenever I try to explain to anyone an opinion that’s remotely faith-based – especially in an industry like theatre that’s largely unreligious and heavily liberal – I’m constantly concerned that my mindset will be immediately discredited (whether consciously or not) for someone who’s not a Christian, despite the fact that I’ve put a huge amount of independent thought into forming my opinions and have not blindly followed doctrine without asking myself the hard questions (at least, I like to think so). Yet at the same time, I have a constant fear of backpedaling too far, of being so concerned that speaking in the context of my religion will alienate people that I neglect that influence entirely – and that’s not fair or correct either.

All that being said, my understanding of what it means to die and of life after death is profoundly Catholic in nature. I believe that when we die, our bodies remain behind (“from dust we were born, and to dust we shall return”) and our souls go on, for most people to purgatory and eventually to heaven, or occasionally to hell or straight to heaven. This, of course, is something that I can’t really develop an opinion on based on in-world experience, because nobody really knows. But it is something that has always connected with me and that I am content to embrace as a tenet of my faith.

Now, I don’t agree with everything the Church teaches about what gets you to heaven or hell (one of the most important instances being that I don’t think you have to be Catholic to go to heaven, even if you have the opportunity to be/exposure to it). But in essence, I believe that if I do my best to live a good life as Jesus taught us, and if I repent and ask for forgiveness when I inevitably screw up, then I will eventually make it to heaven and eternal paradise.

Essentially, what that means is that I’m not afraid of death. Now, I can’t always maintain this healthy macro-level confidence/serenity, especially when it comes to the deaths of people I love or of very young people, and it doesn’t make senseless asks of violence/killing forgivable just because there’s somewhere you get to go on to. But it does mean that I don’t feel like I have to struggle to hold on or like this is the only chance I get to live, because I know it’s not. And I know/sense/believe/whatever you want to call it, that unless I end up really royally evil, what’s next will be infinitely better than anything I can imagine.

Sometimes people ask me how our lives on Earth can possibly be significant if I believe we go on to live elsewhere in eternity, and this is barely a blip on that radar. The answer is easy enough for me: we’re here now, and how could anyone bear to go through life if they spend all their time feeling like they don’t matter? (With extreme difficulty – given that this is one of the biggest struggles for those with depression.)

I clicked through a great interactive site the other day (I’ll post the link if I can find it again) that demonstrated why time seems to pass so much slower when you’re younger; when you’re four, a year has been a whole quarter of your life and therefore seems enormous. But by the time you’re twenty, a single year is only 1/20^thof your life, a significantly smaller number – so imagine how short a year feels fractionally by the time you’re 65 or 100. Our lives in comparison to eternity are a little like that – sure, eternity seems enormous (and is), but we can’t fully grasp what that means; we can only live in and comprehend the amount of time we’re faced with today. And to us, living for a hundred years IS a lot, so of course it matters what we do, how we spend it, who we love, how we treat those around us. And sure, that’s a “faith-based” opinion in-so-far as living a good life helps you get to heaven, but I like to think for most people, being a good person is a, if not THE, goal, regardless of spiritual understanding or upbringing.