Marlon’s World

This has been a week of deaths. Internationally, of course, former Playboy playmate and pop culture icon Anna Nicole Smith collapsed and died in her Florida hotel. In Spain, the news that graced all dailies yesterday was the apparent suicide of Érika Ortiz Rocasolano, the younger sister of Crown Princess Letizia.

In my dorm, death came to a loved one of one of the staff members and everyone — from the dorm manager to the beadles — were visibly shocked. And in Amsterdam where I stayed for three days, I was moved to tears by Vincent Van Gogh’s last painting after associating the image with a fragment of his letter sent to his brother Theo.

Death has really been the great equalizer. No matter how rich we are, or how successful we have become, we are all bound to die one day. It’s hard to accept it no matter what anybody says, especially since death at its very core is a separation, a going-away, an occasion to say farewell.

As a child, my first encounter with death was when our pet canary died. I sobbed for hours and no amount of chocolate milk was enough to console me. Daddy then dropped the bomb: everyone will eventually die. That didn’t help at all. I felt numb all over, then incomprehension began to sink in. For a 6-year-old, knowing that his teacher whom he admired, or his playmate who ate crayons, or the very person who revealed to him the great law of life would also have to die one day is simply just unfair.

But I remember now what an author, Alan Lightman, wrote in his book Einstein’s Dreams. He said that had everything been immortal and death, inexistent, life itself would be meaningless and futile for all of us would just live perpetually without any urgency to do good, to have new experiences, to know more people, to live life to its fullest.

It is only when an end so powerful and so unpredictable such as death comes into the picture that living acquires a tangible form. We live a life with a purpose, whatever it may be, since we know that we don’t have enough time to do all the things we want to do.

I close by remembering all those who died and the loved ones they left behind who now mourn their loss. There are many stories that perhaps would never be told, or many laughters that perhaps would never be heard, or many embraces that would never be felt.

Possibly, we from the outside would never fully comprehend the value of the relationships you shared with these people. But, in the end, the fact that we are all walking toward the same finish line is the single most moving statement that says that we, too, understand what it is to say goodbye.

En memoriam…