the Natural Order of Things

The natural order of things for a pessimist and sometimes a realist is bad to worse. It's a fairly straightforward formula that is generally well accepted by most adults as close to being the "normal" progression of events when dealing with health issues, insurance companies and generally anything to do with local government, the public school system and your parents.


For some strange reason and although there is absolutely no concrete evidence to support this theory, we tend to believe that Death should be put into that same school of negative, sort of concrete sequential thought. We, for the most part, are born, surrounded by, (if we are fortunate enough), a loving supportive family or facsimile thereof. We tend to follow a sort of tried and true recipe of going to school, subscribing to some form of spiritual guidance via organized religion, we later join the workforce, get married, have children of our own and so on.


At some point in our fifties or sixties is when we have begun to get comfortable with our surroundings, ourselves and with the people that we have squirreled into our respective supportive corners. We now know what it is we want, who we want to surround ourselves with and how to go about eliminating those toxic elements in our lives that make us sick or unhappy. This is about the same time that health problems begin their cycle and at some point, we succumb to whatever it is we had not caught quick enough to treat or find the right medication for to extend or prolong that illness and we tend to linger a bit and then we die.

Death comes to all of us through a multitude of ways. He walks many different roads to get to us and in the natural order of things, no matter from which direction he came, always leaves the same well-traversed path in the wake of his departure, namely devastation and loss.


We as humans are always naturally in the middle of something just before we die; We're forever one conversation away from patching up a long-held family squabble, forgiving a past transgression, making good on an old promise, or righting a wrong; But for some us, well most of us really, it's usually something extremely mundane and somewhat formulaic that we are in the act of doing when death finds our doorstep.


I would imagine in those cases that the person might feel like they're not ready, or their mind might say we're too young, or it may be that the consciousness is so entrenched within whatever act the body is engaged in that it may protest for a moment, not accept the unwelcome guest and try to complete its task of pulling the clothes out of the dryer, turning off the coffee pot, or as in the case of Sophie Satereau, continue in the motion of rolling over in bed to reach for the phone.


What makes these types of mundane last moments sort of passings so much more interesting than say that of a person who dies while climbing Mt Everest is that we, the ones who are left behind, know without a doubt what the person was doing or maybe even can guess a little bit what they were thinking when death claims them in the transmission of an extraordinary event and we can say they died brave, doing what they loved and the bottom line is we know why they passed.


For those of us, who are most of us, we do not get the benefit of basking in the glory of that type of sunshine death, where the person is taken quickly and was chosen by death for obvious reasons, no, we are left scrambling in the murky wake and the uninteresting shadows of those unexplained moments when death took our loved ones while they were driving to work or putting a dryer sheet in the laundry or rolling over in bed to answering the phone.


Death doesn't care that no one is ready for him or that the person for whom he is calling upon is in the middle of preparing the testimony of a key witness that will not only skyrocket his career but will also help to set free a wrongly accused man that has been sitting on death row for nearly three decades.


Equally, death will come to and in the same unapologetic fashion, the twenty-something who is tragically taken while rushing the light on her way to that big interview which had she gotten to and awarded the position would have finally launched her career into the medical field where she would later be responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.


And if we, the survivors may conclude anything from this natural order of things, it is the fact that Death while being the most non-judgmental and unprejudicial being within the known universe does, in fact, do his job most efficiently, without bias or self-gratification, takes from all of us, equally and without a hint of favoritism is in truth, probably the biggest asshole we'll ever meet in our lives and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.