Death

            I experienced a shocking tragedy recently, made worse by its familiarity. A man my age, a dear friend, someone involved in enough of my seminal moments that he’ll forever be a touchstone, is dead.

            The third peer I’ve had to mourn in my life. The third close friend. He was thirty-one, the other two hadn’t yet reached twenty-five. It’s a sad commonality for the old to learn, daily, of the deaths of their peers. But there’s never a time where the loss of the young gets to be routine. It always cries out against logic.

            When people this close to you die, several things occur. A piece of you goes forever—we’re selfish beings so we’ll always bring this back to ourselves. You examine your own mortality. You swear you’ve learned to take greater joy in life—at what cost? And you over-think everything.

            Consider that last point; every coincidence pops like a whack-a-mole game, and you convince yourself that you’ve dodged a bullet in a cosmic plan that's out to get you. Nonsense, but that’s where the guilt of relief comes from. Guilt at being the one still alive.

            In 2002, I was living in Taiwan. Two of my Norwegian friends, Magnus and Thor, came to see me. Magnus and I spent the summers of 2000-2002 together, on three different continents. Thor had become a friend of mine through Magnus. They left in August, and in December, still in Taiwan, I learned that one of my best friends, Mike, had been killed in a car accident back in Canada. In March of 2003, Magnus was the one to email me that Thor had been killed in a freak accident. Earlier this week I learned of Magnus’ death.

            Three friends, three deaths, all connected to me, all connected to Taiwan in my head. You over-think this stuff.

            It horrifies me that of the three of us—Magnus, Thor and myself—who went clubbing in Taipei and slept on the beaches of Kenting, I am the only one still alive, not yet thirty-three years old.

            I learned of each death through email, formatted exactly the same way. A loved one (Mike’s brother, Magnus, Magnus’ father) began the note with the abrupt “______ is dead.” Seems harsh, right? But then how do you start an email which serves the singular purpose of delivering a tragedy? You just want to be relieved of it, washed clean.

            You’ll go crazy dwelling on this stuff. You have to find a way to deal with it, to mourn.

            But nobody ever told me how to mourn three friends in one lifetime.

            I haven’t gone a day in seven and a half years without thinking about Mike. I can still hear his voice. Magnus’ death is so fresh that I don’t think I’ve even processed it yet. Some nights lately I wake up crying, and some days I can go for hours without thinking about it—guilty every time I laugh or enjoy any sensation.

            The hardest thing about it is this: I will continue to age. Mike will be twenty-four forever. He’ll never marry, as I have, become a father, or buy a house. Thor will never look back on those crazy summers from the comfort of the “rest of our lives.” And Magnus will never ever again hold his beer to me for a toast with a wry smile, cigarette dangling saying, in that thick Norse sing-song, “Cheers, Paul.”

            There is no sense to death. It’s always just there and sometimes it comes early, sometimes too often. Feeling persecuted by fate will just make you feel crazy. Sadness is natural, guilt is natural, joy of life is natural.

            Today I just want to say this: I am sad and I miss my friends.

The Gardener and the Fire-Starter

            Let me tell you about two kinds of people. Both are fabulously intelligent, but limited at the same time. Let’s call them the gardener and the fire-starter.

            The gardener is a genius. Just ask her. She has studied and studied and read and read and discussed and discussed with like-minded—but always less-informed—people until she has built up a beautiful body of rhetoric that destroys anyone’s counter-attacks. Discourse it ain’t. There’s no learning to be had, just the winning of arguments. The gardener is a sophist.

             The gardener won’t talk about topics she hasn’t studied more than you. She’ll roll her eyes and yawns, because the topics of your expertise are beneath her. She doesn’t function all that well in regular society. Y’see, the gardener doesn’t finish anything, for there are risks to be taken and to risk is to flirt with failure, or at least anything but complete success. She can’t handle that, her reputation can’t handle that. So she instead fortifies herself in the glory of past deeds, she buttresses this fortress with admiring sycophants who feel smarter just by speaking to her. She talks a mean game but in the end she tills her little patch of land uselessly.

            The fire-starter is more interesting, and he stresses me out. For him, purpose is everything. He is driven, revolutionary, brilliant, active. He is ever on the move, ever digesting information, drawing from it what he needs to fuel is never-ending attack on the norm. I respect the fire-starter much more than the gardener.

            His scepticism, though, is his greatest strength and his fatal flaw. He’s a cynic. Nothing is good enough, nothing is to be credited. Everything must be attacked. Anything you love or enjoy must be subverted. The fire-starter sucks a lot of the joy out of life.

            I’ve known many gardeners and fire-starters. They make us question ourselves because the gardener mocks you for risking and the fire-starter shames you for not risking enough.

            If you consider yourself an intelligent person, other intelligent people will have influence upon your thinking. This is right and fair. But, my oh my, what good is there in being influenced by cynics? You enter a spiral of second-guessing and measuring-up and you fail yourself because you’re not true to yourself.

            Purpose.

            Why do we create?

            When brainstorming this with other writers—those I work with or those I teach—we come up with lists. Entertainment, self-expression, to relieve stress, to make money, to describe the human condition, because I can’t paint, because it keeps me from killing all of you people . . . Lots of reasons, all sound, many clichéd.

            And that’s okay.

            But, as for purpose. In On Writing, Stephen King confessed that he’d spent a great deal of his early career feeling guilty about what he wrote, because it was popular horror fiction, it made him money, it wasn’t “literature.” I think there are a lot of writers who must feel the same way.

            Critics abound in this world. It’s much easier to criticize than to create. You just have to sound smart, sound like you’re an expert on a topic, sound like you have a right to say what you’re saying, and then rip somebody’s work to shreds. It’s much easier than hanging yourself out there and exposing a sliver of your soul, hoping that someone will look at it, interact with it, admire its beauty. Critics, in their jealousy, need to trash you because in doing that they can bring you down to their own level, the level at which one cannot create, only dissect.

            I admire Stephen King because there’s a writer who has made it in popular fiction. Do anything popular and people will find a way to vandalize your reputation, because appealing to the masses means sacrificing your integrity. But King has never compromised—he’s not writing for the lowest common denominator, he’s writing for himself.

            And the ability to ignore the gardener and the fire-starter is an admirable one indeed.