We All Matter to Someone

The following is a reproduction of an article of mine that ran in the June 20th, 2014 edition of the Greensboro News and Record:


Know This: We All Matter to Someone

Asked which three words of the English language carried with them the greatest measure of Pathos, I'd wager that the average man on the street would breezily respond with "that's easy-'I love you.'" Allow me to submit an alternative, familiar to anyone who's suffered loss: "now we can't."

"Now" evokes the passage of time, from which none are free, and the point at which we are closest to eternity. "We" is the pronoun of communion, of "I and thou." "Can't", as observed by many a manager and coach, is a seemingly innocuous but ultimately corrosive conversation ender. It stifles debate, and defies reason, because it doesn't come from reason. "Can't" is an emotion, a belief, as is “can”- consider the recent success of "yes, we can!" As a slogan. “Can’t” is informed by experience but is ultimately a condition of the heart, to be overcome only by the will, and the aid of Providence.

I offer this missive in memorandum of my dear friend, who, in the cosmic equivalent of taking his ball home because he didn't want to play anymore, took his own life in June of 2011.

Suicide, like the M*A*S*H* theme says, brings on many changes (though it is indeed not painless). Everything changes, and nothing changes. Author Wendell Barry observed this in a short story in which the reality of a beloved cousin's untimely death is lost on the young protagonist until he saw, hanging on a hook in the barn, the dead boy's coat. This was now a world, he realized (though it had been all along), in which a coat could be hung up and never retrieved; in which people can leave and not come back, and the unthinkable was not impossible. This, in my view, is the loss of innocence, from which many never recover.

Read these words, and really let them sink in. Whether you believe in a morally ordered universe divinely governed, or prefer instead the great purposeless chaos of a cosmic car crash, you matter to someone. Without you, nothing will change- the world will keep on spinning, and the price of tea in China will still fluctuate-but everything will change as well. Everything you could have said, or been, or did, or meant to those around you, would be gone. And that would be tragic.

Fans of "House, M.D." will recall the curmudgeonly doctor's observation that "almost dying changes nothing, but dying changes everything." I almost died of cancer a couple of years ago- allow me to recommend against it if you're given the option- and I can therefore confirm this sentiment. I liked, and continue to like, gummy bears, video games, and making snide remarks, both before and after remission. What has changed, however, is that sense of infinite possibility, the waxy wings with which so many young people fly too close to the sun. The world will get on without me, as it happens, as deflating as that realization was, but without my unique contribution, or yours, which no one can make in our stead, the world will not be what it could be.

Find what you're good at, O reader. Find what brings you joy, and then find out where they meet. Use those gifts to help people, to alleviate their suffering, and to empower them to use their own gifts. Be, in military terms, a force multiplier. "Be the change you wish to see in the world." You can’t relive the past, but here’s what we CAN do: "do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can." People will notice. Because you matter to someone.