Death Among Us

                                    Ramblings of a Retired Mind                                       

 Death Among Us 

Living With Death, Choosing Life

Nothing stirs emotion quite like death. It is the one certainty we all share, yet it arrives without a timetable or warning. We never know when it will come—only that it will.

We encounter death constantly. Sometimes it touches our lives directly; other times it reaches us through news headlines and distant tragedies. We witness loss involving strangers and people we love, and the difference between those two experiences is profound.

The Distance of Public Tragedy

Recent weeks have been filled with reminders of how fragile life can be. Acts of violence driven by hatred, lives taken by floods, fires, and landslides—events that demonstrate both humanity’s darkest impulses and nature’s boundless power.

When these tragedies involve people we do not know, there is a distance that softens the blow. We can feel sadness, sympathy, even anger, but it remains abstract. The loss is real, yet removed.

When the Loss Feels Personal

That distance collapses when death touches someone familiar, even indirectly. When a public figure—someone who shaped our memories through art, music, or leadership—is suddenly taken, it feels personal. We grieve as though we’ve lost a friend.

I remember exactly where I was when Howard Cosell announced the death of John Lennon. I remember Walter Cronkite removing his glasses as he told the nation that President John F. Kennedy had died. These were people we never met, yet their loss felt intimate. We mourned together—as a country, as a generation.

The Weight of Private Grief

But there is a deeper, heavier grief that comes when death reaches into our personal lives. That kind of mourning is different.

I am an orphan. I lost my mother in 1996 and my father in 2001. Most of my parents’ generation—family members and longtime friends—has passed on as well. Now I am watching my own contemporaries begin to leave.

Just last week, my wife received a text message that one of her first cousins was in hospice, facing an aggressive cancer with only days to live. We hadn’t even known she was sick. Yesterday, she passed away. The shock of it—the sudden narrowing of life from ordinary to final—is difficult to process.

How We Carry On

Death is natural, yet its timing is unknowable. If we lived every day fully aware of our own mortality, or constantly feared losing those we love, it would be impossible to function. Perhaps this is a quiet mercy built into us—the ability to move forward despite what we know, deep down, to be true.

Those who leave us do not disappear. They remain in our memories, our stories, our photographs, our laughter. We carry them forward. And when our time comes, we carry them with us.

Choosing Life

So we live—for life. We keep those who have passed alive within us as we continue along our own paths. We pass their stories on to our children and grandchildren, allowing them to live again through remembrance.

I mourn those who have gone, knowing that someday others will mourn me. And I take comfort—real joy—in the stories, photos, and moments shared with those who walked beside me for a time. In remembering them, I keep them here just a little longer.

And for now, that is enough.