Ruminations-On the Passing of Someone Younger

A notice of a younger friend's passing held my attention and made me think about what is brought out in me.

I had just received a notice on Facebook about the passing of someone I knew from college. We lived in the dorms together for nine months, so while we weren’t lifelong friends, we also weren’t just acquaintances.

I was a sophomore and Andy was a freshman, we lived on the same wing of Allen Hall at the University of Illinois. He was an extrovert; I was and am a functioning introvert. We, the sophomores, had convinced the freshman of that year to pull off a prank that could conceivably have put us in serious trouble with the administration. Sure enough, we were put under probation. It might have even been double secret probation. Andy was one of the most vocal and active participants of that prank. This accounted for the crux of our interactions.

After that year we only saw each other on campus occasionally, as I had moved out into independent housing. We would pass each other in the quad and greet each other as we were all in a hurry as all 20-year-olds on a college campus are wont to be. We never kept in touch but we got back in touch a couple of years ago when the serendipitous Facebook algorithm suggested him as a potential “friend” on that platform. I offered it and he accepted. After catching up a bit we would occasionally comment on each other’s postings. Until yesterday.

I suffered pangs of loss of course and was overcome with a melancholy that went far beyond what our surface friendliness warranted. Which got me to think: why?

I read Andy’s obituary and found out he had married his wife soon after his graduation from U of Illinois. My college room mate noted in our group chat that he saw Andy at graduation, and he said that he is getting married to the love of his life and have lots of kids. I saw that he was a father and grandfather many times over. I learned of his working career and of his life as wedged into the format of the obituary.

So why the melancholy? As is true of all human responses, we are selfish. We turn events inward to ourselves and I thought about what his passing meant in context to me. The first salient point comes with respect to chronology: he was a year younger than me. In that context, there is a feeling of there but for the grace of the great unknown go I. We expect people younger than us to outlive us, even though we know people younger than us will perish before we do. Humans also always react more significantly to individuals, particularly individuals who we know or knew at one time, than reports of a large number of people unknown to us.

The importance of my recalling a specific name, some scant memories of a face and a form makes the news more personal of course, but there is a bit more than that. Being able to recall specific memories, no matter how hazy or distant, also makes it much more immediate and present. Even as I can not give you any details about Andy’s life in the intervening 40 years of our non-intersecting life, the pangs of loss that I felt was different from the pangs of loss for someone I knew closely and dearly, and completely differently from the massive loss of lives that I read and hear about on the news. I don’t have any answers, I just have that question.

As I pondered the news of Andy’s passing, some questions came immediately.

·       I wonder how he feels about his shortened time, I wonder if he had plans to do more.

·       I wonder if he was satisfied with his life as he lived it, or whether he had more to do?

·       I wonder if he would have traded for a longer life even if it meant more pain and suffering for himself, his family, and friends?

Turning the subject of the finality of life to myself, I ponder the above questions as it turned to myself:

·       I wonder how I would feel if my time on earth was shortened.  

·       I know I have lots of plans to do more, but it is always disconcerting to be reminded of the open-endedness of my life cycle.

·       Through the ideas of Stoicism, I know that I cannot relive my life, so I cannot help but be satisfied or resigned to my life as it is. I am grateful for what I have accomplished and rarely ponder what could have been; although being human, I still do sometimes.

·       I know that I would not have traded for a longer life even if it meant more pain and suffering for myself, my family, and friends.

Living a Stoicism centered life is extremely difficult, but there are attractions to its tenets. A major one is lessons about the fleetingness of life. The Stoic philosophers relentlessly remind us that life is one continuous flow and that what we experience is a snapshot of a continuous flow. Indeed, time, for many, is a human construct that allows us to take account of our experiences in short perceptible moments. As I am human, I have a difficult time with that.

The other thought that often comes into human consideration is the acknowledgement that life can end at any time, the passing of someone younger is a blunt reminder of that. The question, when turned into our personal context becomes: what do I do with the rest of my life, even as I don’t know how long the rest of my life is?

One stream of thought, for those who are ambitious, involves organizing and listing of credentials recognitions, and accomplishments in preparation of a formal legacy and augmenting that list.

Another stream of thought has to do with listing our bucket lists: a listing of those things that we want to accomplish or experience in our lives and then diving headlong into shortening that list. The assumption is that we should live our lives in a race against time, even though we don’t know when that end time will be for us. One unintended consequence is that we become rushed to just do and never reflect upon why we do, and what we get from doing. We have been conditioned by societal expectations to postpone pleasure and to accomplish our lists by a deadline, even though we don’t know what that deadline is. The promise of waiting for the payoff by postponing pleasure until later is that eventually, we will have time to enjoy those pleasures. But, that eventuality is also predicated upon knowing a deadline, which we don’t know with any certainty. A conundrum indeed.

A lesson in Stoicism is memento mori, which has been in existence since before Stoic time, but their interpretation, as attributed to Seneca, is: “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. … The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”

This then, is a personal and uncomfortable reminder of memento mori.