The DU Lounge

...I've been thinking a lot about mortality.

(It's a joke about my family: We spend our whole lives planning to die, and our planning always gets executed.)

Speaking only for myself, I am grateful for my mortality, since it kind of pushes me to do things I might not do if I could put them off for eternity.

When I was 22, I had a very serious bicycle accident and while I was in a coma, they checked my EEG to see if I was brain dead and could donate my organs.

I failed the test but they let me live anyway.

When I came out of my coma, life suddenly became more beautiful. I started back on my way to psychological recovery from my sense of being a failure. I was a failure as a son and frankly to myself.

Having spent the last several weeks thinking I had serious, possibly fatal health issues, I suddenly feel so much better, not about my health, which is still problematic, but not as bad as I thought, but about the fact that I have lived at all.

I'm an atheist who is nonetheless astounded that I have existed, that life exists, that when "I shuffle off this mortal coil" all over the universe, things will be born into the miraculous and confusing state of being. It fills me with wonder, ineffable wonder, but wonder all the same.

Your friend who is passing lived so well as to be admired by your wife, who must have good taste in men as she married you. That in itself is a life well lived. While I will have sympathy for your loss of a friend, I will be happy that you had a friend about whom you cared so much as to grieve.

Be well my friend, and take a deep, deep breath to think how wonderful it is that air exists. Why it exists we cannot know, but that it does so is beautiful enough.