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A dear friend lost a person close to them recently and that has me thinking and pondering on death and all the various ways it has, from some of my earliest memories, touched my life.

I have no clear idea of how old I was, 5 or 6 I guess, when my puppy ‘Snowball’, a quite unimaginative name for an all-white dog, was struck and killed on the road in front of our North Carolina home, but the incident has stayed with me. Death came again to my life when I was 9, when my brother awoke and told me bluntly that Dad had died. I have no memory of being told that Dad’s illness was terminal and my impression from that time was that it came as quite a shock, but memory is always plastic and unreliable, particularly when trying to recall traumatic events of childhood.

My maternal grandmother, whom we, my mother and some of my siblings, lived with after my father passed, died at home after a long illness. After that I had a respite from death intruding into my life for several years until my brother Lonnie, having sat at the wrong poolside table to escape a summer heat wave, was gunned down along with two other men he had been chatting with. I was 18 and in the United States Navy and my sister recalls, that upon delivering the shocking news to me over the telephone,  that this was the first time she had ever heard me curse.

Death’s intrusions are not always deeply personal. While serving aboard the USS Belleau Wood(LHA-3) on a cruise of the Western Pacific, two men aboard died, one a marine who ignored safety regulations and fell from a helicopter in flight and the other a naval crew chief who was on a helicopter that crashed on the flight deck and then tumbled over the side into the ocean. I knew neither of these men and their deaths touched me only tangentially.

It returned to a personal meaning years after I separated from the quite unsuitable to me and to the U.S. Navy military service.

A close friend and gaming buddy, on the day he purchased his motorcycle, drove the machine after a heated verbal argument with his wife (One should never ride angry. Motorcycles are unforgiving vehicles.) and, taking a curve too fast, jumped the divider and collided with an oncoming truck.

In 1997, following a stroke and a prolonged illness, my mother insisted on returning home, despite the doctors advising her that she would grow weaker and die, who, like her mother, died at home, on her own terms.

COVID-19 took a close friend who perished in the hospital, counted among the more than a million Americans who died due to that disease. Another close friend and writing partner suffered a neurological condition that horribly took his voice and his motor control before taking his life.

It seems that I have experienced death in all the manners in which the Grim Reaper can claim us: terminal disease, homicide, accident, and sudden illness. I can say that there is no ‘easy’ way to experience the loss of a loved one, no method that robs you of their company makes the losing of that company even slightly more bearable. Death comes for all of us. I have known that in the pit of my stomach since I was 9. The best we can do is be aware of that fact and cherish the time we have with each other and not waste it on futile and pointless hatreds and petty disputes.