Adam Scott's Obituary

Last year, a therapist I was seeing, asked if I’d ever written my own obituary or eulogy.  I hadn’t, but the idea intrigued me, so, I wrote a few words.  That was a year ago, and today I revisited those words, and I thought I would share them here. 

Adam never liked funerals. He thought they were strange little plays for the living, polite performances where people finally said all the things they never managed to say while you were still around to hear them.

But Adam tried to showed up. Always, and everyday. For the people he cared about, he showed up in big, messy, meaningful ways, often the way he wished someone would show up for him. Most of the time, though, he walked through life solo, figuring things out as he went. No map, no manual, just instinct and a stubborn kind of hope.

He made mistakes. A lot of them. The kind that left dents and bruises, and stories. No one was harder on Adam than he was on himself, but even when life knocked him flat, he somehow kept getting up. And when no one believed in him, that’s usually when he did his best work.

Adam was a cliff-jumper by nature, not the bungee kind, but the metaphorical sort. He’d leap into new ideas and build the parachute on the way down. Sometimes he landed gracefully. Sometimes… not so much. He failed often, at love, at money, at faith. But even when life fell apart, there was always a spark in him that refused to go out.

That spark looked like a camera in his hand, a story half-written at midnight, a sudden burst of inspiration when everyone else had already given up. He was a self-taught writer, a photographer who saw beauty in the broken, and a collector of wild ideas.

If anything true can be said about Adam, it’s that he lived. Not neatly. Not safely. But with heart and curiosity and a little bit of chaos.

And as his favorite Sinatra song goes —
He did it his way.