already been said

Thanks so much for all the kind comments on the previous post. They meant a lot to me.

I want to talk about other stuff but it's hard. And I wish I could offer some great wisdom about death to all of you, but it's all been said before. In fact, if anything stays with me from this whole rotten experience, it's that most of the clichés about death are, like most of the clichés about everything else (like say for example the old cliché about clichés being true), true.

Clichés don't get repeated into the ground because they're stupid. They get repeated into the ground because they are dead-on accurate and packed with real wisdom. You gotta be pretty damn smart to come up with something that one day becomes a cliché. You know who comes up with clichés? People like Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain. John F. Kennedy and Brian Bosworth. Men blessed both with huge minds to conceive of these ideas, and total mastery of the language to express them in such enduring terms.

So here is a highly accurate cliché you should be aware of about death:

If you are lucky like I am, and you have parents who you really love, you should spend more time with them. Even if you feel like you're spending adequate time, you're probably not.

Your parents are getting old, the conversations maybe aren't as interesting as they were ten years ago, and face it, you're too busy to see them more than you already do.

Whatever the case, I can assure you that when they die, you will wish you had made more time for them. You will realize that nothing made them happier than being with you, especially as they got older. You make them laugh, you make them proud, and they want you to be proud of them too. You are their link to youth, to the world, to the future, you're a wonderful distraction from the loneliness and depression that can set in as you face down your final days and months and years on earth. There will be plenty of times in the near future when you could go see your parents or call them but you'd rather do something else. Well, try to force yourself to hang out with your parents instead of doing whatever else ya got planned, at least four times out of ten.

And laugh at their jokes no matter how many times you’ve heard them.