Task #88

"If something should ever happen to me"
No one will talk about my eventual death with me. Eyebrows furl and voices turn icy. Conversation dries up like Popsicle drippings on concrete during the summer…the comfort evaporating and sucking out easy being. When you speak about your upcoming demise to others, people move away from you. Don’t get me wrong…I haven’t been given a timeline by any outstanding authority or anything. It’s not like I’ve caught some outlandish plague from all my traveling. I don’t have cancer. But a very close friend of mine is scared right now, and her experience is a signpost for me to honor my mortality. In my line of business, I am bombarded daily with stories of woe. Lately, I have taken up the daily affirmation of naming something MISSING from my life for which I am grateful. It starts out like this… I am happy I DON’T have: a cheating husband a venereal disease a yellow sweater a job with the AGI I am happy right now that I don’t have a disease (THAT I KNOW OF). Yet. I am also very much aware that I am on borrowed time. Perhaps it is my past and recent relationships, exposure to cultures that don’t pretend that death is somehow an avoidable family gathering, or maybe I’ve inherited some death gene. What ever the reason, I know that I am going to die. Which doesn’t make me drink gallons of Jack Beam, shoot up powder into the fragile rivers of my nasal cavity, or pick up men with facial hair in bars for mediocre nightly romps. Instead, I tend to gush out heartfelt in-case-something speeches akin to diatribes acted out in lukewarm syncopation on Days of Our Lives. It makes sense that I wanted to create a letter to my loved ones if “something-should-ever-happen-to-me.” I am sending a hard copy to three people I trust just to hold onto when the event occurs…What went into this letter? A whole lot of gush. Click here if you’d like a teaser of the letter… In all honesty, writing this thing took months! Not because I tend to run from ambiguous situations (what can be less ambiguous than death?) but because my words never satiate the gathering mass of emotions continuously multiplying regarding living in this world, regarding loving you. Words insufficient. The things I don’t say as gracious as the ones I choose. Perhaps I’ll revisit this creation from time to time to pay homage, or edit in effort to accurately capture any recession or growth experiences along the way. Perhaps I’ll let it gather the wise barnacles of a time capsule wafting on an ocean floor.

What would you say…if something should ever happen…to me? To you? Simply: I tried to love well