The bookmark in my copy of Half Empty by David Rakoff rests at page 100.
That means I have yet to reach the halfway point of the 224 pages. This is not
the first book I’ve owned when the author passed away. In fact, Rakoff had been
quite public about his battle with cancer. It still caught me off-guard when his death was announced
This
prompted me to wonder how many of the books I own and the music in my
possession were created by individuals who are no longer alive. For some, their
absence has not a tremendous loss. Even if they by some miracle they did create
something new, I’d pretty much feel content with what already exists. While it
was sad for me when John Lee Hooker died, because of the 250+ songs of his on
my computer (fourteen and a half hours worth), it’s hard to imagine that if he
recorded one more song that it would make much difference.
I am more troubled by people who were alive when I first learned of
their existence than those who were dead before I knew they were around. I
can’t miss Miles Davis or John Dewey all that much. In my life, they have
always been deceased. Those who I have read or listened to while they were
still alive but are no longer – their absences bother me. Only in my darkest
moods do I dread the passing of artists and performers who I still want to read
and hear from just a little bit more.
I have heard the elderly say that one of the hardest things about
growing old is that everyone they knew is dead. Even with new births and new
acquaintances added to one’s human life list, at some point it most feel that
half the people you know are dead. Would this be some morbid half-life
(half-death) metric? But wait, that would depend on your social circumstances.
Rather than worrying what death will put me over the halfway point (presuming
I’m not there yet) maybe we could consider how to live life in an effort to delay
this half-dead point for as late in life as possible.
The day after I was born, everybody I had ever met was still alive. The
doctor who smacked my white hiney and the nurses who clucked their tongues when
my mother cursed my father’s name were probably kicking around for several more
decades. My maternal grandmother might have been the first person I actually
was in contact with who died – but I think I was just 3 or 4 years old. A few
days after finishing fourth grade, one of my classmates accidentally killed
himself with a deer rifle – at age ten-and-a-half. That had been one of my favorite
school years and I had cherished my teacher. How tragic to all come together
(minus one) less than a month after summer vacation had begun.
So the plan would be to heavily restrict your acquaintances early on in
life but with the plan to have an ever-accelerating pool of friends as the
years went by. An added strategy would be to select only healthy friends who
possess genes for longevity. If I’m calculating correctly and I doubled my
number of acquaintances each year, then on the day I was married, I would have
known 4 million people. That’s more than the population of Chicago at that
time. I suppose another strategy would be much more escapist wherein I would
move to another part of the world and assume that everyone I once knew was
still alive – which in some ways they could be since I wouldn’t know of their
deaths. It wouldn't be honest but then who would it really matter to except me?
And then I realize that the best compromise is to simply get to know as
many people as I can and hope they remember me with a smile when they hear I’ve
moved along.
