It seems like it takes a death to coerce me into writing. It’s probably more accurate to say it takes a death to make me think. Death is easily the worst thing most people will encounter in their banal lives, and it is also the simplest thing humanity encounters.
A restless night’s sleep, broken up by a touch of insomnia at around 3 AM. You can easily mistake your sleeplessness for excitement of the following day– your birthday celebration. Eventually, you drift back into your dreams of warm kisses from your lover. At 6 though, those dreams will be shattered and long lost.
At approximately 3 AM, May 18, 2001, my grandfather died in his sleep. There was relatively little struggle, but enough to alarm his wife. By the time help arrived, Grandpa was already dancing in heaven. All members of his immediate family were alerted, and by 8 AM that morning, there wasn’t an Ollinger who didn’t know that their great patriarch had gone home to God.
How easy the deceased have it! All they have to do is die; their survivors have to pick up the pieces and move on. They dwell in disbelief, mire themselves in mourning, or associate themselves with apathy. I stupidly chose to immerse myself in ire. I was so angry with everyone. This was my birthday, and now I had to alter my plans drastically. I was so selfish, so priggish, so me…
But in my defense, I quickly metamorphosed into “funeral mode.” I realized the world lost a great man, and more importantly, I lost a great man. Grandpa was a man who loved everything about life. He loved waking up at 5; he loved picking berries in blistering July humidity; he loved swimming in his pool in February; and most of all, he loved God. When I saw his well-worn Bible on his casket as the funeral party sternly filed in the church, tears welled up in my eyes, and I began to sob quietly.
That was the worst thing to see: the tears. They cascaded off everyone’s cheeks, and if eyes weren’t crying, they were about to, like clouds bloated with a summer thunderstorm. I think everyone’s tear ducts had become emotional mines, with a certain comment or memory of Grandpa setting off explosions of sorrow in one’s heart.
There’s something strange about life though. Unless you’re extraordinary, like Ghandi, or you’re infamous, like Hitler, life is nothing more than a speck to humanity. But to the individual, life is something momentous. Although I have yet to experience the unspeakable wondrousness of my child’s birth, I have experienced the unspeakable misfortune of a relative’s death.
One thing that mystifies me is the caprice of human opinion. How can someone who accepts the methods of war possibly condemn something like genetic cloning? What, you can voluntarily take life, but you can’t make it? Either way, you’re playing God.