DEATH
★★★★★
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing death.
At my age I’ve seen a lot of people die. Well, not right in front of me, that would make me sound creepy. But I’ve witnessed how one day you see someone, and the next day they don’t answer the phone, and the day after that their photo is in the obituary section. The closest I came to actually witnessing a death was my wife. I didn’t witness the actual moment it happened, because I turned away to look at the TV and try and solve the puzzle. Then I looked back and she was gone.
At my age my friends die a lot more often than they used to, so I go to a funeral about once a month. One time I went to the same funeral twice because I had left my hat there and it would have been rude to run in and run out, so it was like going to two funerals. Another time I showed up at a birthday party because I assumed I’d been invited to a funeral. It turned out I misread the invitation. That was a happy surprise, and I gave a great eulogy.
People can get very excited by death. The death of terrorists seems to often excite many Americans, and vice versa. Sometimes when criminals are put to death in America, other Americans will show up to watch through a window. Or sometimes people like to watch videos of people dying on the internet. I’ve never been into that.
The American government spends a lot of money to kill people, and to build machines to help making killing people easier, because doing it by hand is a lot of work. The government says they’re killing people to prevent people from being killed, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me when you think about it.
The only time I feel any sense of ease about someone dying is when it ends their suffering. My old army buddy Earl spent his last weeks hooked up to a bunch of tubes and too sedated on pain killers to comprehend the world around him. I was sad to see him go for selfish reasons (he was the only one who remembered where we buried that the gold we took off a Nazi corpse), but happy that he could move on.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Jar Jar Binks.
