“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty, and yet it all seems limitless.” — Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
Hello, dear readers. It’s me again, with what will surely be another introspective, somewhat sorrowful column. It’s been a rough few months for my family, and this is where my heart and head have been. So if you’d prefer not to join on this journey, please go ahead and turn the page. But know, there will be some hope somewhere. There’s gotta be. (That’s what I keep telling myself.)
I first read the above quote years ago when traveling down an internet rabbit hole confirming Brandon Lee’s (son of martial artist Bruce Lee) cause of death. It was, in fact, the result of a defective blank round fired from a prop gun during filming of the 1994 movie The Crow. The excerpted text from the 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky was inscribed on the young actor’s tombstone. I’m reminded of the words when mortality creeps into view, as it tends to do from time to time.
In May, I wrote in this space about my granny Clark being diagnosed with lung and liver cancer. After a couple of weeks in hospice, she passed away in early June with her daughters at her side. In July, my uncle died unexpectedly at his home. And last week, my pawpaw Clark succumbed to, we suspect, a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, which we’d previously been told was a ticking time bomb. These events, in such quick succession, have had me reflecting on certain afternoons from my childhood — those deeply ingrained among the things that have made me, me.
Growing up in Greenwood, Mississippi, my family was close. We gathered often with the many branches that extend from the Clark family tree. As the first grandchild on that side, I was doted on before my cousins were born. My aunts and uncles would have me over for weekends. My first job was helping at the barbecue restaurant and food truck my grandparents owned and operated. Some memories have faded as the years have gone by, but there are still those — taking special trips (my first drive-in movie, a visit to Disney World) with my aunts, being mesmerized by the color-changing lights on a fiber optic lamp at my uncle’s house, smelling the barbecue smoker and preparing plates for long lines of customers with the grands — that are imprinted.
We all have memories that make us nostalgic — longing, maybe, for simpler times, for the carefree days of our youth. Especially with today’s chaos, when the world seems to burn around us as people fight over student loan forgiveness, reproductive freedom, inflation, liveable wages, climate change … this list goes on (and on and on). Keyboard warriors always have something to argue over. Fewer folks actually get out and take a stand, in protest or support of what they find worthy of fighting for. But the sobering fact is, our time is fleeting. We should make the ways in which we spend it count. Whether that’s watching a hummingbird hover at a feeder, playing Barbies with your niece, running a hard-trained marathon, or writing a letter to your congressperson about an issue that’s got you fired up — the choice is yours. No one but you can determine what’s best for you.
We humans are inclined to think we’re going to be here forever. In fits over traffic, petty quarrels, the sink full of dishes. Large or small, these are all temporary troubles, and death is the ultimate reminder that we aren’t on this beautifully broken planet for long. We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life. Choose your battles, savor the joys, discover the lessons in loss. Heal, forgive, and find your own peace — in whatever ways you can — before that final full moon rises in your view.
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