Death

I was listening to Terry Gross today on the radio and she was interviewing people who knew Vic Chesnutt. He was a singer/songwriter that committed suicide this Christmas. He was in a car wreck at 18 that left him paralyzed from the neck down. Somehow he was still able to write. He had a difficult life and had attempted suicide 3 times before. One of the people being interviewed, and I apologize that I didn't hear who it was, said that Vic Chessnut had lived much closer to death than most of us and that it was his artistic response to death that moved people.

Last night I came across a book called Japanese Death Poems. Apparently, there's a tradition of Japanese Zen and Haiku Masters to write poems at the moment of their death. This book is a compilation of some of these poems.

We live our life trying to ignore our impending death when, in fact, it is our best friend. It focuses us in a way that only it can do. Death may well be the single most important event in our life. We should probably all focus on it and think about it every day. There's really nothing to be afraid of.