Birthday Death Post

A weird, self-indulgent birthday post.

That title sounds like an album from the 90s.

I turn 45 today. 44 has been super disruptive, which isn't necessarily bad.

If you've read this newsletter, listened to my podcast, or followed my blog for very long, you know that I think about death a lot. I don't do this in a morbid way. I'm not fascinated with serial killers or mass murderers or anything like that. I can't even watch true crime shows. I've come to believe that death is the one thing that matters in life and that recognizing that will change the way we live though, so I try to recognize it every day.

I lived a lot of my life with death as a present reality. I had no fear of it and loved the thrill of dodging it. I would do things in the car that could have been catastrophic for myself and many others, like driving against traffic or racing down mountain roads with the headlights off at night. I used to rock climb without a rope and let go of the rope when we were rappelling off an interstate bridge, free-falling before stopping just above the ground. It wasn't just crazy stuff, either. None of my lifestyle choices were geared toward a long life.

I feel a sense of anxiety and shame as I write about that. It scares me to remember what I used to do, and I'm ashamed of the way I endangered others. I know we aren't supposed to say things like this about ourselves, but something was wrong with me. That isn't self-judgment or condemnation; it’s just true.

I'm glad all of that is behind me, but at some point after getting my life together I noticed that I had become complacent about life. A lot of things felt meaningless, and I struggled with that.

After going to the doctor for chronic vertigo years ago, they told me that I might have a brain tumor. I noticed that the meaninglessness and apathy disappeared while they were trying to figure it out. When it turned out I do have a little bit of brain damage that makes me dizzy a lot of the time (which is so unfair, I've taken such good care of my body) but no terminal brain tumor, the meaninglessness returned. I realized that remembering death matters, so I started working on how to keep the understanding that this all ends present in my very safe and normal day-to-day life.

I was studying and practicing Zen Buddhism at the time, which helped. One of the key understandings in Zen is that everything changes and that you can accept these changes or be dragged by them. There is a natural element of death and dying as you watch your body age and change, and you learn to deal with this with acceptance and equanimity. Zen was the religion of the samurai for a reason.

Stoicism was also helpful, especially the practice of Memento Mori. This will sound familiar if you read the newsletter because it's been the final section for the last few years. The essence of Memento Mori is remembering that you will die so that you don't lose track of how valuable your life is while also cultivating humility in the face of the inescapable death that comes for all us, rich and poor, ruler and peasant. Practicing Memento Mori helped me remember not to take my new life – beautiful in its simplicity and calm – for granted.

I drove the New Mexico and back a few times last month. I was by myself on one of the trips, and I always get to thinking when I'm by myself. As I left town, I thought about the fact that I was on the same road that I used to take to go to my grandma's, just headed in the opposite direction. I realized that the trip east is one I won't be making anymore, even though it was one of the most important places in the world to me up until she died in May.

I've always had a map in my head of the places that are important to me in my life. There are lines that radiate out from wherever I am and connect to the places where I have people. There are specific densities at the end of those lines depending on how many people I have there and how close I am to them.

When I was young and my parents moved me out of my hometown, the line and the density connecting me to it were very strong because I idealized my hometown, and it was all I thought about. This faded to being almost invisible when I avoided my hometown for a decade and it became unfamiliar and unimportant to me.

I did the same thing with Central Texas when I first moved to Lubbock and hadn't quite accepted living in the West Texas desert. That faded and almost disappeared as I exiled that part of my life for a while, too (I used to abandon anything that was uncomfortable, and my childhood and teenage years became very uncomfortable to me when I first started coming to terms with the kind of person I was and trying to change). Both Central Texas and Northern New Mexico would have disappeared from my map completely if my parents didn't split time between them.

I first noticed these lines and densities when my grandma in Dallas died. I used to see a line going from me to East Texas where my grandparents lived, but it had a pitstop in Dallas where I would see her. My map changed when she died, and Dallas became just another city as the density of her presence there disappeared. I actually hate the entire DFW Metroplex area because of the traffic and how people drive. I'm not cut out for city life, but Dallas used to be important to me because my grandma was there.

These days, the line between myself and my hometown up in the mountains is super strong, and the town has a heavy density as I've reconnected with people there and made new friends. The same goes for the line between myself and Central Texas because my parents, my brother, and his family are there, and I've reconnected with friends in that area.

I have a local version of this map too. There were a lot more lines pre-Covid, but now I work from home and don't leave my neighborhood all that often. There are lines to the kids' schools, our church, and my grocery store, but these will change. Mae will start school with Max next year, so the line to her school and the density of people there will disappear.

I know it's weird. Or, maybe everybody does this, and we just don't talk about it. I don't know. All that is to say that I have this shifting map in my head, and I notice it shifts more and more often these days as people who are important to me die.

My aunt actually died two days ago, following her husband by a few months. The line between me and Ohio collapsed, and I noticed it’s pretty much limited to Texas and New Mexico now. I suppose this happens as we get older.

I was super conscious of these lines and densities on this trip to New Mexico. I used to travel up to Red River with my friends for Spring Break and the summer, and I remembered a lot of different stories that happened along the way.

I remember my friend Jason and I driving up there and breaking down – we thought we were going to see two trains collide while we waited for the tow truck, but they were just on separate tracks that ran close together.

I remember my friend Washington missing a 90-degree turn doing 70 mph. I woke up because I was weightless and then wound up in the passenger side floorboard when we came skidding to a stop on the old farm road we landed on.

Good clean fun.

As you get closer to Red River, you drive through Cimarron Canyon and see how it has not recovered from a massive forest fire it had a few years back. It's still a bunch of stubby little bushes instead of the trees that used to cover it, and there are these temporary retaining walls everywhere because of the mudslides.

At the very end of the drive, you go over Bobcat Pass to get into the town. It takes you from about 7000 feet to 10,000 feet and then back down to 8800 feet in a few miles.

This freak windstorm went through the area a year or two ago and uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees. I read somewhere that a pine tree is essentially an 80-foot sail when you account for the surface area of all the pine needles, and God went sailing that weekend. It looks like someone scattered matchsticks over the sides of the mountains. Hikes I've done hundreds of times are unrecognizable.

I always think of Jason again as I go down the pass. We spent a summer up there together, and he would drive me to the top of the pass so I could rollerblade down. When we got to the bottom the first time he told me we were going about 55 miles an hour on the way down, all with no pads or a helmet. I doubt they would have made a difference at that speed, and I probably would have gone over the guardrail and fallen hundreds of feet before I hit the ground anyway. That's how we lived, though.

Jason had one of those larger-than-life personalities that made everyone want to be around him. He was funny and cool and always knew what to say. I always thought he was invincible. He was fire-jumping at a party, and he collided with someone jumping from the other side. He was unconscious on the coals for a lot longer than anyone should be – it burned him up, and he was in the hospital for a long time. We always laughed about how it burned his tattoos off except for one – the Japanese symbol for good luck.

He was always a lot cooler than me, and I looked up to him. He died back in October.

My town has fewer and fewer people I know in it because the generation of adults that raised me has begun to die off. Growing up in a small town like that, I had a bunch of grown-ups watching out for me, and I knew all my friend's parents. We pretty much ran around and did what we wanted and wound up at different people's houses throughout the day. Random people would feed us or give us band-aids. A lot of them have passed away now. I can't go anywhere in town without thinking about somebody who’s not here anymore.

The newest reminder of the inevitability of death comes from the biker shootout that happened up there back on Memorial Day. It happened right in front of our house; we’ve think we found all the bullet holes now. The store next to us had six or seven bullets come through the walls and into the building. It's a small miracle that nobody but the people in the shootout itself got killed.

None of this is meant to be morbid or depressing. It's the way of life. We're born, we die. Some stuff happens in-between. I'm not sure there's a reason to have a strong opinion about that.

None of the big things that we think are eternal are actually eternal. Everything changes.

As a kid growing up in a vast forest surrounded by mountains I believed it would all last forever, but strong winds or a big fire can change the landscape so much that it won't return to what I remember until long after I'm dead.

The adults who watched out for me seemed like they knew everything and would always be there, but they are leaving one by one.

Extraordinary people with once-in-a-lifetime personalities and a knack for surviving things they shouldn't wind up in the same ground as the people who slip in the shower and bikers who shoot each other.

This is all OK.

It's the way things are, and it's above my pay grade. I let myself mourn when I need to. I know the whole grieving process back and forth, but at the end of it all, it's just the way life goes.

I like taking a moment to recognize that I'm a little bit closer to the latter part of the birth/life/death sequence every year on this day. Thanks for letting me ramble about it.

Take care,

James