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My Views on Death

My Views on Death I would have to say that if you wanted to really understand my views on death, you would have to understand where I am coming from. So I’m going to take you on a small road trip through my life. It’s painful and filled with sorrow but it’s all true. A long time ago, longer than I can remember now, I had a small cousin. His name was Stephen and he must have been around four years old. He lived out on the reservation with my aunt and her family. Sometimes he would live up on the mesa where they usually hold religious ceremonies. One of the pastimes that is still practiced today is that during the downtimes of the ceremonies, the children of the village will go to the edge of the mesa and throw rocks off it just to see what they can hit. The edge of the mesa in some places is not very structurally stable. He happened to be in the wrong place when he threw a rock of the edge and part of the edge gave way. He plummeted over 200 feet to his death. A few years later I started middle school in a town in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing great about the town. The one thing that I think that we value the most about it is the fact that just about everybody, knows everybody else. I met a boy when I started wrestling for the first time. We were all very new to the sport, but he took to it like a fish takes to water. He always seemed to know what to do in just about any situation that you could possibly imagine. He was also very popular. He was known and loved by all. One day he had some friends over at his house and he decided to show off his family’s handgun. He thought it would be cool to point it at his head and pull the trigger. He didn’t know that the gun was loaded. He died almost instantly. Everything that he was and everything that he could have been was gone in a flash. The town joined together in sorrow. I don’t think that we ever collectively recovered. Not more than a few summers ago, one of the town football stars was with his friends at the lake that is right next to the town. Jeff was also another rising star. His talents were coming in to play as we were moving on in to high school. You could almost hear the scouts drooling. I remember that I was at the lake that day. My grandmother had come to visit us from New York. That day was particularly hot so we decided to cool off at the lake. It was about four when we headed back in to town. On the way back we spotted Classic Lifeguard I, the pride of our local air ambulance fleet, sitting beside the lake. I thought, “That can only mean one thing. Some Snowbird or foreigner drowned. Poor bastard.” The next day I read the paper. Local child drowned it said. It took some doing but I found out what had happened. My friends Scott and Trampus were out cliff jumping with Jeff. They had all decided that they were going to jump off at the same time just so the splash would be bigger. The counted off and Jeff jumped off before the other two. He managed to hit the water an instant before Scott. Scott’s feet landed right on Jeff’s neck. The force of a 60-foot fall shattered several of Jeff’s vertebrae. I pray to this day that he was knocked unconscious or killed right then. They found his body 400 feet down in the murky depths of Lake Powell. It took them months with robots to find him. To this day I still have nightmares about him being conscious on the way down. Not being able to move. Not being able to swim up to the surface. Not being able to breathe. Just falling. In 1997 another person in my class was killed. He wasn’t the greatest person I knew. He wasn’t exactly the brightest either. We used to stay to our respective groups and that was that. He lived out on the reservation and I lived in town so I didn’t see much of him either. One day, apparently, he decided that he was going to siphon gas from a car in to another tank. I don’t know why he was doing it, but he siphoned it by mouth. After a while he swallowed some gas or was asphyxiated by the fumes. He passed out and who ever he was with called the ambulance. It was a thirty-minute drive to his house, since he lived on the reservation but by the time that the ambulance arrived, he was already dead. Last year a couple of kids were speeding there way out home on Highway 89. Most of you may know that this particular highway is a several year winner of the deadliest highway in the US. The four came to a turn. At over a hundred miles an hour they couldn’t make it. The car flipped and twisted and shattered until you couldn’t even realize that it was a car any more. As for my friends inside, well as you can imagine, what was left was strewn over a couple hundred feet of highway. They had just gotten out of school and had managed to beat a school bus full of elementary school children back to the rez. The driver had all of the children duck down so they couldn’t see what had happened. It’s sad to think that some of the kid’s brothers were in that car. It’s sad to think that some of those kids looked up to them. Saw them as people that they wanted to be like. Someone they loved. People who were now no more than an assortment of body parts and greasy spots on a lonely stretch of highway. I guess that after a while I got tired of the funerals. I got tired of the gossip that went around. “Did you hear what happened?” I had gotten to hate those words. I got tired of my friends disappearing one by one. Victor Hugo talked about in Les Miserables “Empty chairs at empty tables” By the time we graduated 6 people were not there to pick up their diplomas. It may not seem like a lot, but to a graduating class of under a hundred students, it’s devastating. I am not really sure how I feel about death. I respect it. I fear it. But I know now that I have to live my life every day. I have to become everything that I know that I can be. Sometimes I think about those kids. Did they do everything that they wanted to do? What could have they become? I think about the lives they will never touch, the children they will never have, or the lives they will never lead. Death comes suddenly, like lightning. You never know where it’s going to hit. And it could happen anywhere or any time. So you have to live your life like there’s no tomorrow. Because there isn’t. Tomorrow is a gift not a right. Bibliography:

Word Count: 1246