How can death be both so common and so controversial?  it's an experience everyone has observed in others, and ultimately will undergo themselves.  In my case I knew it first from movies and books.  Its enormity, gravity, irrevocability only hit home for the first time about 6 or 7 years ago, when my dad's friend's wife passed away.  It was my first time in a funeral parlor. The idea of being next to a body that no longer contains the personality and will of a person that I used to admire and appreciate did not sit well with me.  It still doesn't.

A couple of years later my grandmother died.  I've been expecting her death since early childhood - she was a very sick woman.  I remember thinking every new year's eve that it would be her last.  But for years, she kept surviving and beating the odds.  So when she finally succumbed, I felt a strange mixture of relief for the end of her suffering, and surprise that this time she didn't cheat death.  How can something so inevitable be still so surprising?  It still surprises me, more than 5 years later, that I can't just call her up.  

To me death is final.  It is the ultimate undoing of a person - where not only does his subjective experience end, but also his will his desires his vision can no longer be asserted.  To me the aspect of being unable to affect the world around me is the scariest part of death.  Someone can attack people I love, walk all over my ideals, make mockery of my projects, my beliefs, break everything i've worked for my entire life - and there is nothing I can do about it.  Greatness or accomplishment matters little in death.  The will of the least deserving living will always trump the vision of the most deserving dead.  

Humans have long been inventing ways to circumvent this reality.  Life after death.  Reincarnation.  Separation of body and Soul.  Ghosts and parallel universes.  Like little children who close their eyes and pretend they are invisible, majority of humans preach  far fetched stories even when the truth is laying right before them.  Yes it's hard to let go.  But if death is universal and ultimately inevitable, why can't we just accept it for what it is, an end to life?  

Lives end but they are not erased.  Speaking of the dead in the present makes sense when their memory or affect on you is current.  Belief in a post-humous myth is not necessary.  Ron was the first to expect from me Visayan conversation.  He was not shy to address me in the local vernacular in class, knowing full well I had no idea what he was saying.  He threw down the Bisdak gauntlet to me, and I know he would have been proud of my progress if he had met me in recent days.  Or maybe he would have expected more of me.  Its not an answer I can get now.  Nor will I ever hear him play an instrument.  We were not close friends, and its a well-known side of him that I did not know, but I wish I did.

Doc told me that Ronnie describes me as someone who sees black and white with little gray in between.  Doc says Ron appreciates my directness.  If so, then I know I am not violating his will and his vision by neither aggrandizing nor belittling the degree of our interactions in 2007.  I hope he would have appreciated my honestly about death.  His death.  Ultimately, life-after-death mythology is to make it easier for some of the living.  But this post is for me, and I don't need a sugar coat.  And I have a feeling that neither does the one person I wish could read this entry, but never will.

I am lucky to have crossed paths with him.  And that crossing won't be forgotten.