Earlier this week, one of the Sigma Kappa sisters passed away. As I stood silently in a circle with members of the Greek community, her sorority sisters, and her non-Greek friends and neighbors, I watched as people stepped forward and told stories about her, and happy memories they had shared.
And part of me wonders if it will go that way for me... Not necessarily the same, gather in a circle in front of my dorm, per se. But, if all my friends, my fraternity brothers, the people I consider the family I don't really have, my parents and one Aunt notwithstanding will show up somewhere... I wonder if they'll gather, and hopefully not in a funeral home, because those are reserved for sad, unhappy deaths. There's no smiles in a funeral home.
Because when I die, I really hope everyone gets wasted, and sits down in the biggest room in my house and tells stories. And those stories don't just have to be the happy ones, because life, my friends, is not all sunshine and rainbows. Granted, for every sad story, I expect one happy one, because it does balance itself out.
I don't want everyone dressed in black, I don't want everyone to sit there and cry. I want my death to cause everyone to celebrate who I was while I was alive. The man they knew and loved, and even some of them, hated. Because I want my most bitter enemies there too. Its not about who you made happy, because if you make everyone happy, then I don't think you're really reaching people. If you do not occasionally piss someone off, then you are not really sending a message that needs sending. So, naturally, I want the people who didn't really like me there, too. Because even if it was in a negative way, I still, technically had an effect on them.
I want people to realize just how much I changed their lives, and go forth from that point trying to do that much more for the people around them... not like Paying it Forward, which is a really trite method of saying you should be nice to people, but rather like, taking the things about me they liked and embodying them in their own way.
"Fate rarely calls upon us at a moment of our choosing." -Optimus Prime
Death is the last adventure that we don't know the end result of. People have climbed every mountain, been to the bottom of every ocean, ridden tidal waves, chased tornadoes, and come back to tell us what they saw.
No one I have heard of, with the exception of one particularly exceptional individual, has ever come back from death, and told us what it was like.
"When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."
"When Death Comes"
-Mary Oliver
*This post is dedicated to Laura and all her SK sisters. I can not imagine the struggles you are experiencing, but it speaks volumes to Laura's character that you all shared so many stories and fond memories of her Monday night. My thoughts and prayers are with all her families: Greek, biological, and any other. *
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