Sunday, April 15, 2018

ON THE DEATH OF A FRIEND  

"Hey Jeff!  There’s something I withheld from you."
        I cup my ears and pretend to hear the answer: 
        "Oh yeah, would you like to tell me?"
         "We salute you as a free spirit, a free thinker.  
         You’re a 21st century Bryon, a Shelley, a Blake.  
         A lanky visionary born in the wrong century.   
         An artist with the sensibility of a poet and the appetite of a horny toad."

Death throws us for a loop.  
        It may very well be the loop of infinity, but nothing throws us for a loop like death.  
        To be so alive one moment - so aware, so imaginative, so intelligent - languidly smiling with the wisdom of the ages...
        And the next moment, poof!  A burned-out light bulb - a drained battery ready to be sent back to the recycling center.
 
        It doesn’t seem possible.  Or credible.
        No wonder we cannot stomach death.  No wonder we shudder.  We recoil on ourselves.  We are left confounded and speechless.
How can something so exquisitely good just vanish in a heartbeat - or the lack of one?
How can we go from the heart and brain of a genius that produces beautiful epics like this to an empty mouth from which we are never going to hear again….

Death is probably the hardest thing we're ever going to face.  
How do we respond to this shocking turn of events. 
We can act chastened, subdued.  
        We can act like we got slapped in the face.  
        Or doused with cold water.  
        We can get all moody and somber, and even start to doubt that life can be as beautiful as it’s cracked up to be. 
 
        Or we can realize that what makes death so hard to take is not its brute reality.  It is the stark contract it provides to the  poetry and magic of life.  
Death would be nothing if life were not really something.   
 
        And so we  take the aliveness and vision that made Jeff so special and share it with one another in a feast of reason, a flow of soul.  
        We take the spirit of this Renaissance man and make it OUR spirit!  
        We unleash the lover and visionary in ourselves.  
        We declare today Jeff Trosper Day and whoop it up in his name.

        Death is not so daunting when we take the stellar qualities of the dead and make our lives richer and fuller by making them our own.  
        We reach out to help each other become poets and painters, tantric sexpots and polymaths.  
        We nurse a newfound appreciation for the very things we are gathered today to celebrate in Jeff’s life.  
        Jeff may be dead, but we can find the Jeff in each other.  
       We laugh and play and sing and philosophize as if Jeff were alive in each and every one of us….
       Or as the main character says in An Illumined Legacy
          “Open the heart of joy to me and I will become a thing of value.”