It has come to my attention that I am the sum of my life experiences all jumbled up and spit out into a 41 year old who lives in Utah and doesn't know what to do with himself most of the time.
A lot of those experiences happened in the 90's, that time of my life when I was a teenager and learning to communicate with others, learning what was cool and what wasn't (nothing really is or isn't maybe?), and learning to deal with emotions, tragedy, connections, BIG things, little things, and every other thing that there was for me to experience.
Tragedy. For years I kept a manila folder with clippings from newspapers that contained obituaries of people I knew--my neighbor (one of my mom's best friends) who died from cancer, my grandma, kids I knew at school who took their own lives. I also kept the printed programs from their funerals. It moved from my childhood desk drawer to file cabinets after I moved out of my parents' house. It existed between folders with bank statements and tax returns. On the folder I had written "Funerals and Stuff." I can't say for sure why I included "and Stuff;" maybe it took the sting out of the morbidity of this collection of reminders of the stark reality of life's fragility.
It makes me think of one person in particular. I didn't know him that well. He was a young twenty-something man who I knew through my job at a bank. He would bring in wads of cash to deposit in his bank account. He was a server at a restaurant, and this was his tip income. We would have really pleasant conversations whenever I had the chance to assist him. One day I realized that I hadn't seen him in a while, so I pulled up his info to see if perhaps he was going to a different location. I saw that his accounts were all closed, and, as I dug a little deeper found a note that indicated that he was deceased.
I couldn't believe it. I Googled his name and found his obituary. He is buried in the Provo Cemetery. Last year when I was at the cemetery visiting my dad's grave, I looked up on the map where this young man was buried so I could visit his grave and just acknowledge him and his life. I went to where the map indicated his grave was, but there was no marker. Somehow that broke my heart. I really don't know that much about him outside of the little he shared with me in our brief interactions, but I feel like it is important for me to remember him and to be grateful for the goodness he brought into my life.
