A friend said I seemed to be doing better at dropping my interest in and reference to death. She said I am not that old and it isn't cool. I have noticed that I seem to use Google every other day to find out if a given person is alive now or not. Doing that is not because I am overly concerned with death. Just about the opposite: it seems that writing, photography, movies and video has somewhat abolished death. I was impressed with the relevance of today's Doonesbury cartoon:
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2021/04/11
What bugs us today may be very much like what bugged people in previous times. From Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States":
In 1676, seventy years after Virginia was founded, a hundred years before it supplied leadership for the American Revolution, that colony faced a rebellion of white frontiersmen, joined by slaves and servants, a rebellion so threatening that the governor had to flee the burning capital of Jamestown, and England decided to send a thousand soldiers across the Atlantic, hoping to maintain order among forty thousand colonists. This was Bacon's Rebellion.
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States (Modern Classics) (p. 50). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
I am impressed with the diligence that somebody uses to keep the language of a Google search current. If someone is alive now, at the moment of search, the text on the page reads "is". If that person has died, it says "was".
To me, the fact that I need to look someone up to find if they are alive or not rather suggests that being dead is irrelevant, at least for some purposes. If someone lived in the 1800's and letters written by that person are discovered now, we learn about that person, perhaps in a way similar to having a cup of tea with that person and talking. So, use your pen and scrap paper, or your notebook, or your journal, use your camera or video recorder to say what's up. Deciding what actually is up, framing what's up in words or interpretive dance is good for you and valuable for those that follow.
