YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. Yes, YOU are going to die. Maybe not today or tomorrow or even sometime soon, but you will. Run, scream, hide all you want, but the Grim Reaper's claw is going to rest on your shoulder and there is no escape on that day baby. Yup, you gonna be ten toes up pushing up daisies, worm food, the main course at a creepy-crawly bug banquet (maggots like the squishy, soft internal organs). An argument for cremation?

Have you seen a dead body or watch someone die? It ain't pretty. Barf material. The movies lie; it is not a nice, soft, little whimper. The body does not lay about all angelic, gracefully in slumber waiting for the ambulance. A dead body goes a grey-blue. Even if you are black, yellow, brown, tan, or white - you go the colour of death. And your friendly cadaver releases bodily fluids as well. Think about it? All the muscles and valves holding things in stop working. And whether you are wearing rags or Donna Karan, all that crap (pun intended) has to go somewhere. OUT. Mind you, wardrobe will not be a concern.

People are dropping like flies. Canada/US in 1998, the total was 2,560,495 (I looked it up). How many people die as a result of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, car accidents, urban violence, freak occurrences, cancers, any other alphabetised illness, and let's not forget NATURAL CAUSES? It's the cycle called life in which we are spinning and eventually all the twirling stops. Your ride on the merry-go-round is up. No extra airtime options available. Everything dies.

So "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" (Dylan Thomas, Dead-Class of 1953) all you want. Keep your illusionary fire of immortality burning in the furnace of your psyche. But one day, your ass, faggoty or otherwise, will be history. And just as John Smith of 200 years ago is not even a blip on anyone's emotional radar, John Smith of today will be on no one's mind 200 years hence. So fold your arms and pout all sourpussed or get on with it. Oh and guess what? It can get worse.

Chances are the people around you that you really care about are going to drop off before you. Actually the law of averages says that anyone older than you by a millisecond is slated for old bony hand before you. And I know everyone you love is not younger than you are. Now that just plain sucks. Seeing family and friends kick the bucket is not a happy camper day - no matter how much Hallmark wishes to seal the moment. And no matter what the euphemism you use to hide your heart from the reality, DEAD IS DEAD.

So go ahead, say poor Uncle Ling has passed on, passed away, is deceased, no longer with us, moved over to the other side, gone to his heavenly reward, but in the end he is still dead. This is not some detached "Oh ain't I all with it" cold shoulder being given to the grief stricken. I've been there. Spent my time in sackcloth and ashes, beating my breast, singing dirges in the dark, carried the box of family and friends, and moved on. But Death ain't about the forever horizontal. Listen, I got a story.

When my grandmother died I felt like shit. Sure I could attempt to wrap my feelings in more pedantic expressions, but the reality is much too base for reverential eloquence. I felt like shit.

My grandmother, as many such women are, was the truest example of compassion in my life. Mother Teresa who? I never appreciated her as much as I should or could have. I met her on numerous occasions when I was a child, but I only discovered her beauty during my adult years. All my child's eyes saw was a slouched over greyed-hair lady, wearing out-of-style flower-print nightdresses, and who always smelled damp. One big walking mothball coming at me, pinching my cheeks, and copping a hug. I think she held my sorry ass in a different if not higher regard than many of her other grandchildren. She knew my father was a rough man who drank too much and was aware of the difficulties we all faced as a result. She always slipped more money into my pocket.

As an adult, I only visited her three or four times a year. But though my gesture was sporadic and half-hearted, it was always quality time. I would sit and listen for at least two hours per visit. She would tell her stories of childhood, rich with detail. She spoke casually about her pain and suffering. What struck me as inspiring was, all her stories, even the ones recounting great trials with her husband, were told with an absence of malice. Meanwhile I was all sucky faced, banging my head against the world, screaming bloody murder for every injustice encountered, real or imagined. All her ramblings were simple storytelling. It is impossible to draw a timeline from her narrative, but the yarns were all on grand themes not held by the constraints of a calendar. It was through my grandmother's eyes that I finally came to have some understanding of my father's humanity. She tried to show me that people are basically good.

When she died, I grieved for a number of reasons. The most obvious being I had lost a great sense of love and support and strength, at a time in my life when I had little of all three. (I was up the wazoo with psycho diarrhoea.) Another was that I had not tapped into that love, support, and strength as often as I had need for it. I think I could have told her I have this affection for other boy's genitalia and she would have been fine with it. And the reason I felt like shit? I only visited with her based on my own selfish needs. Many a time I had not had lunch and knew she would feed me or she would send me off with five dollars, quickly to be spent at McDonald's. How poor white trash of me. Not once did I think that she would be lonely. Not once did I consider that she had needs that I could fill. She gave and I took. She continued to give and I continued to take. I used her.

After the wallowing in self-pity ended, I maturely grieved the loss of a beautiful woman. I began to hear some of the words she once spoke. When she was in her early eighties I asked her if she was afraid to die. "No," came her swift and sincere reply. She went on to say she had lived a long life with no regrets. She truly believed she had tried to be a good person and treated everyone the same: fairly. She did not want anyone to cry for her. "Why cry and waste time on me when I'm dead. Give your tears to those who need them. People whose lives are going nowhere, people who do not have a job, and families who cannot feed their children." These people deserved sympathetic tears more than a woman whose life had seen much joy.

Leo Buscaglia, the American-Italian educator, commonly known as the hug doctor (Dead-Class of 1997), once said that we miss the point when it comes to death. Death of another should remind us of our own mortality. We should not worry about how we shall die but rather how we are living. Death becomes me these days. When I encounter death, I take it as an opportunity to take stock of my life. Am I living as I wish to be living? Or am I as dead as the deceased? If I were to discover I was about to die, could I say I have lived a full life? Do I give every day my complete attention? As far as I know, I am not going to die tomorrow and that is a good thing. For I still have a long way to go when it comes to understanding what life is all about. I have a long way to go when it comes to accepting MY humanity. I have a long way to go in believing that all people are good. There is a chance that I will have to work on these things up until the day the dirt is thrown over me. But hopefully when my death does come, I will rest knowing that yes, I did live a long good life. And my grandmother would think so too.

To steal and bastardise a famous Shakespeare thought (Dead-Class of 1616), "Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once." There are many people walking around this planet who are emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually dead; their bodies are just taking a little longer to catch up.

 (This first started out as a journal entry to help with the loss of my grandmother. That entry then was the leaping off point for the DRAGÜN magazine article which appears here.)

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