Learning of the death of a loved one can make once-weighty matters seem suddenly frivolous. That documentation deadline I was stressing about last week? Pooh. That’s not a deadline. Death is a deadline.
Death also makes the already-frivolous seem fucking ridiculous. I took a small walk at lunch today, to clear my mind, and I passed a well-dressed young woman who squealed into her cell phone “I was like, so, like, whatever, so, like, see you!” What? How can you waste the few precious breaths given to you by your creator on jargon that’s like, so, like insipid?
But death does not spur creativity. As I prepare for a last-minute trip to PA to attend my Grandma’s funeral, my mind isn’t exactly in the mood to write in the style that I typically adopt for this website. It’s too busy pondering stuff. Death stuff. Life stuff. Stuff involving black shoes and whether they are appropriately somber. Sad stuff. And happy stuff and memories of Grandma.
