We're Born and Then we Die---What's the in Between all About?

A good friend of my niece’s just passed away this week while on a trip to Hawaii. He was only 65. I knew him slightly back when he was a college student working part-time at a large wholesale/retail flower shop and greenhouse where, at the time, I was working full time. But over the years I’d read and heard a lot about him as his career path took him from being a fourth grade teacher to a district reading coordinator to the principal of the elementary school where he and my niece both recently retired from. He was also active in the Michigan Elementary Principals Association but the kids at his school, perhaps, will best remember him as Zero the Hero, a red tights and swim goggles wearing guy who was passionate about getting each and every child in his school fired up about reading. It’s hard to lose a good friend. I could be wrong but I think this is the first time my niece is experiencing that unwelcome life experience. He was the best man at her wedding, a golf buddy to her husband, a fellow member of their long-standing poker club and far more than just her principal.

Other than my husband, I can’t even say that I’ve experiencing losing a close friend and especially to something as unexpected as a lethal heart attack. Before Don died, I had occasionally wondered who would be the first in my circle of friends to die and I even recall thinking after he passed that I didn’t need to wonder anymore. It was Don. He was my first friend to die. We are acclimated to losing older members of our families and can console ourselves that the person who died lived a long life filled with many blessings or joys. Widows in my age bracket can even console ourselves by saying the same thing about our spouses. With a person like Zero the Hero I know many will be consoled by his life-long history of giving his all to his passion projects. At his retirement party Zero the Hero said of his school, "I feel like I've taken more than I've given with this job. You just can't have a down day here. There's just too much positive energy all the time." But from what I hear tell, he wasn’t giving himself enough credit for having created and maintained that positive energy for so many years.

When someone we respect dies and the dust settles, even someone we mostly knew through someone else or through the media we can’t help looking at our own lives and taking stock of what we’re contributing to the world. Have we fulfilled our legacy, made our tiny piece of the world a better place? Have we accomplished enough things on our Bucket Lists? Have we had enough fun, given enough, loved enough? And I keep coming back to the sentiments expressed by Burt Bacharach’s song: “What's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live? What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?” Theologians have been working on that for centuries and think they have all the answers, and perhaps they do. We grow up learning about good versus evil, free will, the concept of God, the soul and the afterlife. And we like to think we are a part of something bigger than just waking up every morning to a new day, a new start. What is that something bigger than ourselves? A minister once told me: “The secret is there is no secret. Life is about love. You can interchange the word ‘love’ for ‘God’ and ‘God for ‘love’ and that’s all there is to it. We are here to love one another.” If that's true, then people like Zero the Hero left this world full-filling his mission. He was loved deeply and he loved deeply. 

I can’t image what it’s like growing up not knowing love. As a widow and a person who lost both my parents I still struggle with feeling like there is no one left on earth who loves me. Intellectually, I know that isn’t true but in my heart I miss hearing the words. I have one niece-in-law who never misses saying it at the end of a visit or phone call but that’s all. I have friends who have a pact with their spouses to say “I love you” at the end of every phone call. Something about wanting that to be the last words the other hears if one should die while they’re apart. It seems strange, sometimes, to hear one side of a phone call where heated or tense words are being exchanged but they still end their call with, “I love you.” But then again, maybe that’s exactly the right time to say it. I’ve read a few widow blogs where the writers were racked with guilt because they’d been fighting just before their spouses passed away and they wish they'd gotten the chance to say, "I love you." I got to say that to Don a few minutes before he died and to hear him say back, “love” which was the very best his aphasic brain could do and that was enough. I hope Zero the Hero’s family also got to hear the three most important words in the English language. Note to anyone still reading this, please say them today to someone you love. ©