I Read the News Today…
I recently turned 62. Norm Macdonald didn’t. Born less than a month after I, he would have, had he not lost his battle with cancer a week shy of my birthday and a month before his own. Or, as he said in one of his delectably droll standup routines, “It ended in a draw. The cancer is dead too.”
Although I didn’t know him personally, I spent many a late Saturday evening with him as he deadpanned his way through SNL’s Weekend Update or did Burt Reynolds in a big foam ten gallon cowboy hat better than Burt himself could have. After that, he often rode in my car with me, entertaining me courtesy of Sirius XM.
When I heard of his death (I sense he’d have hated the euphemism passing) I thought immediately of a bit of his I’d heard on the radio only a few days prior. He recalled someone consoling him after his father died of a heart attack, splayed out on the floor, having fallen off the couch: “He’s in a better place,” said the well-meaning bystander.
“I’m not so sure of that,” quipped Macdonald. “He was on the couch. That seems like a better place than the floor.”
The Report of my Death…
We often grieve the passing of famous personalities with whom we have no personal relationship. According to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, we do so because we feel a “parasocial connection” with them, so “their death feels like the loss of a friend; their death severs a link to one’s youth… makes us more aware of our own mortality.” The closer in age they were to us, the more acute the sensation. We feel part of their cohort – or as the cotton industry would say, they are part of the “fabric of our lives.” This was certainly truer for me when Macdonald died, than, say, when Charlie Watts died (at 80). The growing list of obituaries of those that die close to our own ages serves as an otherworldly barometer of our personal life expectancy.
I think about my own death daily. Not in a particularly morose way. I am fit and hale and work hard to stay that way. But actuarially – in terms of the number of trips around the sun - I’m simply that much closer to my demise. The life expectancy in the United States is 78.54 years overall - 76.1 for men and 81.1 for women. I don’t know if Macdonald felt cheated out of more than 15 good years. For all I know, the only thing on his bucket list was kicking the bucket. But for me, the opportunity cost of dying is my long to do list. I still have at least two decades to crank out that second book and annoy my children, among other things.
Nevertheless, I believe that an awareness of the Grim Reaper’s relative proximity is a matter of mindfulness and not morbidness. It makes me live more intentionally, in ways both small and large. For example, I recently deaquisitioned an incalculably large supply of “gift with purchase” booty. The thought of my boys sorting through my things after my funeral and finding dozens of tiny bottles of Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion resembling so much coagulated butter horrified me.
Just Do It
We often wring hands, hang heads, and whisper platitudes when a tragedy occurs. Deeply upsetting events make us sit back and take stock – much as New Year’s Eve does. We assess and reassess our own lives, make resolutions to change; to live more intentionally. And then, typically, do nothing.
When I lived in Stratford Upon Avon, I knew the specific expiration date of my tenure there. As such, I made a point of noticing everything. From visiting as many places in England as I could, to memorizing the patterns of the stones paving the streets and the wisteria that covered the front of the Shakespeare Institute. I wanted to appreciate everything. Although I don’t know my own expiration date, I do try to live with the same attention to detail and appreciation.
I want to do everything I want to do, and those things I don’t yet even know I want to do, for as long as I want while I still can. I wonder what Macdonald wanted to do that he didn’t or couldn’t as the cancer fought with him.
I recently turned 62. Norm Macdonald didn’t. I celebrate my own aging and lament his inability to do the same. I am sorry for any suffering he may have endured – physically or emotionally - and for the hole he leaves in the comic cosmos. I will endeavor to honor the memory of his dry wit and the joy it brought me by damning the torpedoes and making the most of the remaining several decades. I urge everyone to turn these reports that trigger despair or disappointment into motivation to stop the hand wringing, head hanging, and whispering.
And Just Do It. Whatever that may be.