OK, I suppose I should start by assuring everyone that I’m not dead. Not quite yet, anyway. (Cue the man from Monty Python and the Holy Grail being hauled off shouting, “I’m not dead yet!” Honestly, that’s been my life’s aesthetic for years, stubbornly alive due to spite and coffee).
Still, I had a good laugh over the flood of messages after I posted my “obitchuary”. Most of them were some variation of, “You son of a bitch, I thought you were dead!” And for someone who’s spent a decent portion of life assuming their absence would barely register, I have to admit, it was oddly touching. Not the reaction I was aiming for, but a heartwarming bit of unintended chaos all the same.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed we all quietly share that same haunting thought, that our deaths would go largely unnoticed, that our lives ripple too softly to matter. It’s why It’s a Wonderful Life still makes half the planet cry into their hot cocoa every December. Of course, life doesn’t really follow movie logic. We don’t get soaring orchestras or conveniently timed redemption arcs. Cops aren’t “buddies,” and no one solves a murder in under an hour.
But here’s the lovely, inconvenient truth: we matter more than we think. We leave fingerprints on people’s lives, sometimes smudged, sometimes shining. I know I’ve made my mark, some of it gentle, some of it… less so. There are a few people who’d probably spit on my grave, and honestly, that’s fair. We don’t get to choose the whole impact we leave; we just scatter it like glitter and hope it catches the light more often than not.
Yesterday, in therapy, I mentioned a time I “unfortunately survived.” My therapist immediately countered, kindly but firmly, that I had it backward. “You fortunately survived,” she said. “Messy, imperfect, maybe even a little scorched, but alive.” She’s right, of course, though I still think of myself more like Iago from Aladdin 2, muttering, “You’d be surprised what you can live through.”
So maybe that’s the lesson hiding under all this: life’s ridiculous, messy, unfair, and still wildly worth living. We’re all just shuffling through our own sketch comedy, absurd, painful, full of strange beauty, trying to make it to the next punchline with a bit of dignity left.
Until next time, keep creating, keep living, and if you must write your own obituary, make sure it’s funny enough that people text you to see if you’re still breathing.
