Chuck Perrin

A good friend of mine lost his father to cancer yesterday. It got me thinking about my own father, also gone. I was with him when he had a stroke, 3 years ago this month. Why is it so hard for us to come to grips with the reality of death? Every one of us will face it, one day. None of us know when. It feels like we should treat it more like a natural occurrence, perhaps even a prospect. But instead we invest the term with this unwarranted power, just because it is inevitable.
Could it not just be another part of existence – a different place further on down the road – that we don’t now fully understand?
I was searching for some way to express that to my friend without being cloying or maudlin, when I remembered this passage from John Marsden’s book While I Live:
“That night in bed I was thinking about the way creeks and streams operate. They start off little, gurgling and bubbling and jumping over rocks and stuff, full of energy, going all over the place. Then they get older and bigger, become rivers, take a more definite course, stick to their path, know where they’re going, get slower and wider. And eventually they reach the ocean and become part of this vast mysterious world of water that stretches away forever.
Yep, just like people.”

the 7/10 split
a good and gentle man