R.I.P?

 

We’re insatiable. Gnashing our increasingly worn teeth with each devastating loss. Oh my god…Betty White. (Yea, but she was just minutes away from her 100th birthday. We should all be so lucky.) Dobie Gillis…ancient. Sidney Poitier…ditto.

I can barely see the iPhone screen through my tears after hearing the devastating news about Bob Saget… as I frantically search Google, trying to remember who the hell he was.

We, as a society, are phenomenally bored, in constant need of ever more shocking and higher-profile deaths to mourn. Anything to break the monotony.

Wonder what Jack Nicholson is up to?

Hey, calm down, don’t give yourself an aneurism worrying about it. We all eat, sleep, poop, scurry around quite a bit, and die. Everything, everywhere, dies. It’s just part of the package.

But dying isn’t the problem, that’s just life. It’s the walking dead that we need to worry about. All of us that are still breathing.

 I watched the 1990 Robin Williams movie, “Awakenings” on Netflix recently. It  tells the story of a doctor who  discovered the beneficial effects of an experimental drug when administered  to catatonic patients. The main patient (played by Robert deNiro) and the rest of the patients, are awakened after being in comas for decades and have to deal with a new life in a new time.

It's an interesting and fun premise, and wacky hilarity ensues…but that’s not the point.

Now fully awake for the first time after spending 30 years in a coma, Robert DeNiro takes a long look around. With his new-found appreciation for life itself, DeNiro realized that most people sleep-walk through their lives and are rarely appreciative of just how wonderful it is to be present, breathing life in and out. We spend too much time in a different form of coma, worrying about things that may or may not happen in the future, and almost no time being in the now, being present.

Robert DeNiro had to awaken from a thirty-year coma to really see it. Many of us never do.

 Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon, aka country comedian Minnie Pearl, would race out onto center stage at the Grand Ol Opry and crow: "How-w-w-DEE-E-E-E! I'm jest so proud to be here!" Her familiar greeting never failed to elicit a huge audience response of recognition…and agreement. Yes, Minnie was happy to be on stage to entertain the nice people, but she was also stating what should be obvious to all of us…life is short, revel in it, celebrate the moments, be present. We should all be “jest so proud to be here!”

That’s our responsibility, our challenge from Bob Saget and…oh my God!…now Louis Anderson too! (Google, Google) (And from anyone else near or far who has already transitioned.) I believe they would tell us the same thing if they could…enjoy the ride right here and now. This is heaven, this is hell. Stop worrying about the next thing, be present, be ecstatic that you are simply alive. Be like Minnie “Just so proud to be here!” That’s our obligation to Dwayne Hickman, Meat Loaf, all of those who are no longer on life’s stage.

I take it all to heart, being conscious to maintain an “attitude of gratitude”. That said, I  often have to agree with Clarence Darrow when he said, "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." 

So there’s that too.