Death and Pedestals

There's an old saying about "nothin's sure but death and taxes" and the older I get the more I recognize the truth in that short sentiment. About the only thing not taxed these days is breathing and I'm sure as soon as the government can figure out a way to collect a tax on that it'll be added to the list of taxable items. It's discouraging.

And then there's death. Another old saying that notes the transience of life is that "nobody gets out of this life alive." Well, so far as I know, that's the absolute truth. Everybody dies and only a couple of people have managed to leave this planet by translation rather than internment and resurrection (although one of them did get resurrected).

I can't count the number of funerals, memorial services, wakes and "visitations" I've attended over the course of my life. Even as a toddler, I remember going to Uncle This's or Aunt That's visitations and funerals. I've been to the funerals of parents, contemporaries, relatives of varying degrees of kinship, friends who have acted as mentors and guides and many who have had a major impact on my life. There have been so many, as they euphemistically say in the funeral business, "passed over" that I've lost count. At their funerals they've always been noted for their good points (even a few eulogies that really had to stretch to avoid the old shibboleth about not saying anything bad about the dead). I guess none of us want to be remembered as Cassius put it in Julius Caesar, "The evil that men do lives after them, but the good is often interred with their bones."

Sitting at a funeral, a memorial service or even just in front of the computer screen contemplating all the deaths that have occurred during my lifetime, mainly of people I know since I hardly knew every single person who has died over the course of the last 64 years, I look for the common thread (other than they existed and were part of my life in some way). Many of them were people I knew, trusted, loved and sometimes adored. Sure, they were real people and, more or less, had their quirks, foibles and quite often hints (or outright mentions) of little things that probably not that many people were aware of, particularly if it was something less than stellar. I think of all the people I put on pedestals in my life only to find the feet of clay of many of them long before the formerly sainted one shuffled off the mortal coil.

I heard of another death a while ago of someone I knew, formerly admired greatly and who, I felt, did something I didn't agree with in the slightest and so the pedestal broke and the person was relegated to a nodding acquaintance. They had many good qualities but I couldn't really see them that well after that episode. Probably that's a bad thing and something I should work to overcome.

Pedestals are damn uncomfortable things, I imagine, unless you're a Stylite and retreat to your column for the sake of your soul. Even so I imagine the Stylites didn't see living on a pedestal (or a column) to be a comfortable thing, exposed to the wind and weather, totally visible at all times, no privacy, no creature comforts and probably living on the generosity of followers to whom you were supposed to guide and mentor into a more spiritual life through your words and examples. Certainly Stylites are no longer in fashion as they once were, and modern people tend to put people like rock or movie stars, sports figures, clerical people, teachers, and the like on pedestals only to be extremely willing to tear them down at the least sign of perceived weakness. Perhaps that is what I did to so many in my life -- put them on pedestals and loved them there only to find that they weren't perfect by a long shot. Still, there have been a few, a very few, who, even though I saw their feet of clay, still stayed on their pedestals in my heart until the day they died and even to this day. I hope they aren't too disappointed in how I turned out after all their love and care.

I guess what I have learned about pedestals and death is that I can love without idolizing, accept the humanity without looking for sainthood, and pray for the souls of the departed, even the ones who I felt fell off their columns and pedestals. I pray they rest in peace and rise in glory, just as I pray someone will do that for me when my turn comes, despite all my flaws and faults and gigantic mistakes. I honestly can say that of all the fallen pedestal-standers there really is only one about whom I can think of not a lot of good and so I guess I need to work on changing that.  I need to do it not because I have to in order to earn a gold star or even a gold crown but because I need to do it for me.

May all rest in peace and rise to thrones prepared for them with God. Thank you for the lessons you have taught me, even if I'm a very slow learner sometimes.