Barely Even Half

Dearest Rachel –

On the mornings you would wake up without having had a dream to relate, you would often have a song stuck in your head. Now, you and I had different methods for expelling earworms; if mine was annoying enough, I would usually try to conjure something else up in my head to drown the original one out. Admittedly, there were times when that left me with a cure that was worse than the disease, but that was a chance I was generally willing to take. You, on the other hand, would sing it out, hoping to exorcise it by reciting the fully song – but woe be unto you if you couldn’t remember the song in its entirety, as it would be stuck in your head for hours thereafter!

As I don’t know all the words to this song (and even when I listen to it, I still can’t catch all of them – modern music, am I right?), and since I’m not usually much for even speaking when I wake up in the morning (especially now that there’s only Siri to talk to, and she doesn’t hold a candle to you), I figure it just best to put up the original artist. After all, while I’ve recorded my voice for these letters at least once before, he does it better than I could, and in any event, it’s easier in this medium to just embed his video rather than go to all that trouble, anyway.

There’s something nice about having pastors at church from various different generations. I appreciate Pastor Scott, for instance, for being a wiser voice than mine, because I need it more often that I’d like to admit. But his son – and the several other colleagues his age on staff – are better able to reach out to those younger folks, as well as keeping us older ones somewhat in touch with the popular culture of the day. Most of my familiarity with popular music stops at the end of the Eighties, apart from the ones around which a handful of truly classic anime music videos were constructed (and even some of them reached as far back as our own time, you’ll recall).

My point is, I wouldn’t know about this song if it weren’t for it being used in church, of all places. I think the point of the message was – apart from the obvious about how little time we have – that it could take our entire lives to “count all the ways” that God is, although I’m not quite sure about whether He was meant to be the ‘You’ of his lyrics. Considering that the ‘I’ of the video was only shown having a paramour at twenty-two (and to think, that’s where I’m aiming to find myself again – talk about hopeless pursuits!) – although he does talk about having kids on the way at thirty-three, I guess – and the fact that John Ondrasik is an unabashed Christian, it’s entirely possible. And it’s true that one could indeed study Him for a lifetime and barely scratch the surface of who He is. On the other hand, Jesus pointed out that the way to heaven was made as simple as possible – so simple, in fact, that like new math, only a child could do it!

Kidding aside, the road to heaven is both simple enough to get onto without too much thought, and difficult enough to spend a lifetime working our way upward on it, and even then, we won’t be able to comprehend anywhere near everything, not even in a hundred years.

In fact, that’s what stuck in my craw as I sensed this song running through my head this morning. “Only” a hundred years… really? Most of us don’t get nearly that much time; you had barely even half that.

Not that it’s something I’d been unaware of before your accident; I’ve always been conscious of the brevity of life. You know this better than most, ever since we first bonded over the story of my ‘friend’ Petra (I use quotes simply because the two of us weren’t that close in reality – she was shy to the point of being mute, and I didn’t know how to talk to a girl at that age). In fact, I’ve always been of the impression that I wasn’t likely to reach the three score and ten that was the generally accepted ‘break-even’ point for lifespans. I was particularly nervous my senior year, as I thought of 1986 being the inverse of 1968 (my birth year) and thus possibly a numerological endpoint. There’s never been any particular – or logical– reason why; I just assumed that my life would get cut short at some point. After all, it had been amply demonstrated to me that it happens.

However, at this point, I’ve come to realize that sometimes the tragedy isn’t in being the one who dies. Unlike in Shakespearean drama (where everyone winds up dead by the end), the tragic hero in Greek theater generally tends to be the one who’s left standing alone, having lost everything (and, more importantly, everyone) to the events of the play – although, since this is literature and not real life, it’s usually from their own hubris or some other fatal flaw rather than some random disaster (and Greeks being Greeks, they might well blame even ‘random’ disasters on the ire of the gods). It may well be that’s where I’m headed at this point, and I’m not sure I’m looking forward to that prospect any more than I am toward whatever will end up being my ultimate earthly fate.

Of course, you might point out that I haven’t yet lost nearly as much as you had, even given your comparatively short time here. After all, I still have both my parents, and they are still well in possession of their faculties (apart from Dad’s inability to eat anything more than yogurt and gelatin, but he seems to have come to terms with it), and that’s a worthy point to make. To be sure, they’ve a ways to go before they’re as old as your parents were when you lost them, so it may not be a fair comparison. On the other hand, given the progression of life on this planet, it’s likely I’ll see that day yet, and have one up on you, since you never lost a love, in either manner.

And with that having been said, I found one more song for you to consider. I don’t know how I discovered it; I think it just may have been an algorithmic delivery from Apple Music, but I don’t know what I had it search for to lead up to it. I’ve mentioned before how songs about breakups read almost the same as those memorializing the object of the song (apart from any underlying anger in the former type). This is definitely one that encapsulates the sense of questioning why one – or really, anything – should, or would, continue on after losing you:

But of course, the world does go on, regardless of any confusion on my part as to why, leaving me to try to make something of this new phase of my life. It’s not exactly the crisis Ondrasik was necessarily referring to himself as facing at forty-five – and it’s not something I ever considered or wanted to go through (but then, who ever does?) – but it certainly will do.

With that in mind, honey, keep an eye on me going forward, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.