Blog Dis

And there he was or maybe he was a she... a little critter splayed across the pavement, intestines squeezed out like spaghetti with little clawed paws turned upward to the sky. No one seemed to mind, a dead squirrel in the middle of the road. I noticed because I walk to work on the days when I work in the office. When you walk to work, and pretty much walk everywhere because you don't own a car, you tend to notice a lot, perhaps too much at times.

No sooner had I walked a few blocks, I saw a dead pigeon on the side of the road, whose chest cavity had been hollowed out clean. I recognized this sign as I've seen it before; when a hawk is hungry it will predate on pigeons, as though their dining out for lunch. Pigeons don't have natural predators in a city's downtown core, other than hawks and, a hawk's flying skill is superior to a pigeon, so they don't stand a chance. But pigeons have safety in numbers, generally speaking, given that hawk's are solitary birds unless nesting with a partner.

Death and life abound, are all around, are with us every minute of the day. As a general rule, I try not to waste my time thinking about my mortality. It's enough that we each will have to deal with the death of parents (lost my Dad some 25+ years ago), persons who are in the business of teaching children how to play at this game called life, lessons from the day we're born. That is the last lesson my one surviving parent will impart to me: How to die. I don't imagine it will be pretty and I know I'll become visibly shattered by the event. But try as I might, avoiding death is... well, unavoidable.

Death is like the past, a collection of people, thoughts and events that at one stage had thrived to the point of having an impact on the living. Death can certainly be viewed as the past, to my way of thinking, but death is also the present as it touches anyone and anything with its long tentacle fingers, pointing to you with an all-knowing finger of wisdom: Now It Is Your Time To Die.

Death has given the arts world a plethora of avenues with which to carve out stories, from appreciating the little things in life to attempting to make sense of the world while civil wars rage. There are few, if any, images that can be thrown at people that have yet to be seen, but images of death still affect us. Movies have trodden on the death mobile since celluloid became all the fashion. Take Monty Python's movie, The Meaning of Life, wherein one particular scene has Death visiting a group of aristocrats to collect the day's tally of bodies and the guests invite Death to their dinner table, refusing to acknowledge Death. The scene ends with each person dying from poisoned salmon but the interchange between Death and the guests is rare fodder for comedy, skillfully handled by the insane practitioners of Python.

What concerns me in the here and now, while I'm alive and breathing, able-bodied and free-thinking, are the death of ideas — all the geniuses of this world whose exceptional intellectual capacity is lost forever. The brain of a genius is so far advanced that they hold within their mind the ability to affect the world at large forever; think Newton and Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and others in the field of science like Cecilia Payne (the first women to receive a PhD at Radcliffe College in Astronomy, who discovered what the Universe is made of - hydrogen). Another futurist thinker also regarded as a genius was Canada's renowned philosopher, Marshall McLuhan, who predicted the impact of the global village, before the Internet had even been invented, and who taught the world about media theory. Yet, in the end his genius and those before him, and those yet to come, was not enough to save them from death. Pity, their intellectual prowess can't be downloaded like some video game into a live server and uploaded at a later time in evolution to another mind. Perhaps this may come one day.

I do not fear death. I've come close to dying several times through drowning, not to mention my issues with skin cancer (two surgeries in the can) that made me re-think how I live my life, and where I should best place my efforts. The day I went for my first skin cancer surgery, my mother tagged along with me to the admittance desk and stayed before I was prepped for surgery. Mom tells me that I didn't look frightened at all and I wasn't, truth be told. I knew that I had lived and done the things I wanted to do, like travel to exotic locales. I had loved and been loved, with my fair share of heartbreak too, plus I had released three collections of poetry, and I felt that if this particular day was the day I would die, I'd do just that, die. But I didn't. It took me years to recover from the surgery, and even more years to complete writing my series of urban paranormal fantasy novels, ten years in total (what I consider the equivalent of a BA and a Masters).

This is a slightly morbid post, so I shall leave you with an uplifting quote from one of my favourite movies, The Sheltering Sky, wherein the narrator sits in the corner of an unusual dusty bar in Tangiers, North Africa, uttering with an eye squinted by wisdom the following truism, "... because we never know when we're going to die, we tend to view our lives as being limitless, but how many remarkable full moons shall you remember?" Before you die, you'll live your life building memories, experiencing all that you were meant to experience, and more than you had expected, I can assure you, like battling skin cancer or other health-related illnesses; experiences that make you question the value of your life, from the perspective of your mortality.

If today there was no knock on your door from Death, then I highly recommend you open the door and take yourself on a long walk. And should you come across a dead critter on the road, stop and take a good look. Death reminds you that you're still a part of the living, at least until that day comes when it's your time to expire, and your life is officially over.