Musings on Mortality

**WARNING: Stream-of-consciousness-type introspection ahead!**

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I've been thinking about mortality quite a bit lately.

The death of Ronald Reagan. The anniversary of D-Day. My father's 55th birthday, and his mother's (my grandmother's) 80th birthday.

80 years. That's four times as old as I am. Four of my lifetimes. I wonder if I'll see that many. I wonder what the world will be like, what I will be like, if I do...

My job at CBU involves sifting through the inactive files and setting aside the files with a Last Date of Activity (LDA) of 1997 or earlier. These people entered and dropped out of college before I was done with high school. Some before I was even born. Some died. Some graduated from other schools. Most just didn't come back, for reasons unknown to us. Now they're just names and numbers, records in a computer file.

Our lives are so fleeting. I know this intellectually, but I'm not sure I really get it. All I really know about is my own life. Human existence is very egocentric; from our perspectives, the world really does revolve around each of us. And yet, our lives are so short. Most of the people who lived through World War I have died, because of war, accident, or the inexorable passage of time. Many of those who lived through World War II have died or won't be around too much longer.

But the world doesn't end. History marches on. A few exceptional people are remembered in books, movies, documentaries. How many have only a slab of stone somewhere? How many more don't even have that? Since the first human, how many people have lived and died on this planet?

We took the freeway to CBU this morning, as usual. There were too many cars to count. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of cars. Each with people inside. Each person with his or her own destination, each with his or her own life. And that was just in our half-hour drive.

The population of Los Angeles in 2002 was estimated at almost 10 million people. 10 million. How many people are you close friends with? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? One hundred? How many people do you know? Three hundred? Five hundred? One thousand? Fifteen thousand? It could take a couple lifetimes just to meet everyone in L.A. And that's just one city! A large city, but still just one city. How many cities are there in the U.S.? In the world?

It's like pondering the size of the universe. "Vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big," as Douglas Adams said. Hundreds of billions of people: being born, living their lives, dying. For thousands of years. Hundreds of generations. Mind-boggling.

I haven't had to deal with the death of anyone close to me. Not yet. I know people who have, and I wish I could really sympathize. I wish I could help them cope. But I can't. All I can offer is a listening ear and shoulder to cry on. I don't know what it's really like. I can imagine it, but I'm sure the reality is immeasurably worse.

But it's only a matter of time before it happens to me. Maybe my grandmother gets cancer and dies quietly in the hospital. Maybe my brother gets in an accident on the freeway and dies on the way to the emergency room. Maybe a plane crashes somewhere between Dallas and Longview and a handful of my friends are gone, just like that.

So many people in the world. So many lives. And I'll never know more than a part of a fraction of a tiny percentage of them. What's the point? What's the significance of any single person? Why do we bother with this thing called "life?" Why do we make such a big deal about behaving and getting along? Why do we make friends, knowing that sooner or later we're going to be hurt?

To my friends reading this (you know who you are): It's true, if a bit cliche, that you never know when a fatal accident might happen. So just in case, I want to say the following. I won't embarrass you or myself by trying to explain or describe how much you mean to me. I'm not sure words could truly express that. I feel closer to you than to just about anyone outside my immediate family. Thank you for being who you are and for putting up with me.

If it weren't for my faith in God, I'd be awfully depressed right about now.

Anyone who says Christianity is a nice, sane religion that makes perfect sense all the time is either lying or several daisies short of a flower bed. Christianity is crazy. It's absurd. It's beyond human comprehension. But that's why it works. It may not give us all the answers, or at least not right when we want them, but it gives us more than enough. In some strange, extra-logical way that we can't even begin to understand, it works. It's true.

And that's enough to brighten anyone's day.

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There. The pseudo-philosophy is over. Discuss.