Beyond the Random Crap of Living

There’s Living, and then there’s Life. These days I find myself so enmeshed in the Living part of things that I lose track of Life. It’s a forest for the trees sort of thing.

When I do have time to search the forest, I sometimes find myself contemplating mortality’s end. It isn’t the sort of thing that I get to talk about. Inserting the theme into everyday conversation seems to be a buzzkill. I have no immediate plans to explore the topic first hand. I am, however, coming to realize that planning for the eventual inevitable would probably make me more popular in the past tense than failure to prepare would. I may have bombed most popularity tests in life, but I’d like to think I could at least pass the final exam.

At the end of all days, what do you do with stuff? The most popular approach seems to be to bequeath it. To relatives, preferably. I have two sisters, and not much else. If you go through about three or four iterations of “cousins X times removed” then I think I’ve got some relatives in Florida that I met once about four decades ago. My parents were both only children, and their children never procreated, and so this branch of the genetic tree gets pruned in a few more decades or so. The bequeath to a relative thing isn’t viable.

And yeah, I’ve got a husband, and yeah, he’ll get whatever the hell he wants of my stuff. But he’s an only kid, with the same shtick of no cousins, no offspring, pruning the family tree, yadda, yadda, yadda. It doesn’t answer the question, just puts off the need for an answer.

I’ve had some good luck in life. A subset of this luck is that, over the years, I have accumulated some cool shit, treasures that will live long past memory and me. Stuff that deserves better than to end up on a Goodwill dollar sale shelf or, worse, a Thrifty Bin rental dumpster. How does one ensure that inanimate objects receive a future worthy of the joy they’ve provided me over the years?

So I’m musing on the best way to deal with Gambol and Frolic, a $425 ill-conceived splurge that I couldn’t afford as a newly graduated college student and is now worth well over $2000 dollars. But that Cybis piece will find a loving home more easily than the vaguely heart-shaped river pebble that The Professor found and presented to me on one of our early day-trips together. It’s a question of “Who is going to love that which I have loved?”.

I reflect on infinity and know that, in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, this quandary really doesn’t matter. And then I remember a truth: that some infinities are bigger than others. (It really is true. The Prof taught it to me, and even though I can’t really wrap my mind around the concept, I embrace the poetry of the math.) And so I rethink infinity and know that it matters a great deal. My personal infinity may be somewhat smaller than the Universe’s, but it’s my infinity. The random crap of living, in its sum, represents a life. Its disposition is the final sentence in the paragraph a citizen of the universe gets to write in the Book of Life.

I’m working on an idea ….

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One Comment

  1. Please share the idea because it’s lost to me right now. At some point I will cease to exist and the things I loved will mean nothing to anyone and my memory will fade much sooner rather than later.

    I’ve started making arrangements for my beloved pets and they are GOOD arrangements which means they will probably not remember me, either.

    I’m OK with thoughts of my demise. In some respects I embrace the idea and welcome the serenity (or the hot whiskey, depending….).

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