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11 November 2004. Mortality.
Today at the school where I sub, I ran into a teacher I know from lunchroom chats. We were outside the classrooms. Classes were still going on, so no others were around. In other words, we had privacy. I guess that's why she went beyond her hello to bring up her son. She asked me if I remembered her telling me about him--"you know, the one I've said you remind me of?" "Sure," I said, expecting to hear something good about him.
But she told me he had died in his sleep two weeks ago. He was only 44. Heart attack. There was some other complicating health problem he hadn't known about. He had seemed in good health.
I remind his mother of him, I think, because he was a non-conformist, and not in the fast lane. He worked in an old folks home in some substitute-teacher-level occupation. High IQ (160) and creative (I guess his mother knows I'm a poet and has guessed I have a high IQ, and probably her son's personality resembled mine).
I felt the standard things: grief for my friend's grief; sorrow at the unfairness of it all; helplessness; a mingling of relief that it was someone else and fear that if he could go, I might be next. So, it became all about me. That doesn't bother me. After all, I'm 63; death can't be too far away for me. Why shouldn't someone else's death get me thinking about my own?
When I was a teen-ager, I thought 50 years would be enough. I wouldn't mind dying after that. I thought, and said, that if a person hadn't become tops in his field by the time he was fifty, he should commit suicide. I then included being acclaimed as part of being tops in one's field. Becoming tops in one's field was all the really mattered to me, at the time. Still is. I still want certification, too, but that's genuinely of small importance to me. Anyway, I've never been very afraid of death, only of not getting enough time to do what I feel I'm here for. I think that once I feel I've finished my life's works--publishing a full version of my theory of psychology; publishing final versions of the ten or twelve plays I have in various stages ranging from truly finished to maybe 75% finished although complete; finishing my Of Manywhere-at-Once; composing my Harbor View pluraesthetic epic poem; and hitting my peak as a lyric poet, which I don't think I quite have yet.
Another possibility is that aging will so weaken me that I'll stop caring whether I finish my life's works or not. I feel intimations of this more than I'd like to. But I so far have always brushed them off.
What I think is weird about me is that although I expected to have entered, and be known to have entered, the ranks of the great long before this, I have had unusual patience. I've never panicked. I've always assumed that I would have enough time. I don't know why that is. Yes, I can see that my assumption may well be due to some flaw of my psychology. I also understand that any achievements of mine have to be minor in a universe as large as ours, and in a segment of time so brief compared to the eternity I believe existence occupies. Nonetheless, I yearn for the feeling of fulfillment I believe I will experience once I believe I've completed my life's works. Indeed, I've already felt a little of it because of my best poems, and a few other works.
With that, I end this trite entry. Sad that the death of a friend's son couldn't have flushed anything better out of me.
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