Those Who Conquer Death

"To conquer death, all you have to do is die."

There's a line in Jesus Christ Superstar that means one thing in the film but resonates differently today. "To conquer death, all you have to do is die."

I'm rapidly approaching my fifty-seventh birthday and, of course, as I tend around this anniversary of the march of time, I reflect a bit on the inevitable. Discussions of my father's decline come up like small talk. I have to grant someone the benefit of my life insurance in the benefits package for the new gig—I decide my sister will get the payout should I go—and thoughts of being gone surface. Seems like a lot of people in my age bracket are snuffing out lately.

My mom jokes with me. "What? People your age are dying? Go figure that. I never noticed. We better call your sister because that's new!"

I read in the digital version of the Chicago Reader that a few people who I used to know, used to work with, have croaked. The ages range from forty-four to seventy-nine and it strikes me that it isn't the age of the people that piques me. I made it past forty-four so I might stick the landing on seventy-nine and, hell, I don't have any control of my date with the grim dude anyway. Death, for me, for anyone, was as likely in my twenties as it is now or later. It isn't the age. It's the proximity.

I watch on the news about humans dying every single day. Murder victims, those who nature takes out in the form of natural disaster (which, truly, is only a disaster for humans because nature doesn't care about fires or floods and more than I do a bowel movement or a sneeze), strange accidents, and the natural demise of the human body just coming to an end like a Pinto that simply won't start anymore and can't be repaired sitting on the side of the road, abandoned. For the most part, these lists of the recent dead are met with some sort of emotional response ("Holy shit! A rogue wave just washed her out into the ocean?" or "Wow. Santos's mom died in 9/11 and six years later? Crazy.") but not the unsettling ache of familiarity.

When I was throwing darts at jobs earlier, in my few nights working in a Kansas casino on the graveyard shift, one of my new (and then later quickly discarded) co-workers asked about my wife (as I had mentioned moving to Vegas with her). I casually told him she had died in Vegas. While, in a sense, this is true—the woman I married made such bizarre choices once we settled in the desert I can say that I mourn the loss of the person I married—I know she's still out there, exchanging sex for money and not actually dead. More accurately, she's dead to me which is a choice that dying doesn't provide.

My dad makes a comment that all the people he used to know are dead—he tells stories about them as if they weren't—and I wonder about those people I knew or know who in a few years will fit that description from me or if I will soon be one of those ghosts and I recall that line from the rock opera.

We don't exactly conquer death. We conquer the mystery of it. We overcome the Woody Allen-ish preoccupation with ending. We get the answer to the question: what now?

I know my grandfather died at fifty-eight and my uncle, whom I'm named for, had a heart attack at sixty-one. I'm hearing those bells toll, gang but the question I'm asking isn't "What now?" but "What? Now."

I'm no longer interested in ever being married again. I'm not going to have kids. Watching my pops makes me understand that staying alive for the sake of avoiding death is a grim prison of choice. I'm past my mid-life crisis and am no longer driven to pretend I'm still young and I'm not enticed by the rocking chair on the porch. I work out, not out of vanity, but to keep myself physically able to do at least some of things I used to be able to do and in foresight of being to walk up a flight of stairs and carry my own luggage when I’m seventy-five (knock on wood).

To conquer death, one need only die. To conquer life, well that’s a horse of a different color, now, isn’t it? To win at life, you need to live. Not in some adolescent “fuck, fight, and get fucked up” sort of way or even the FOMO “live your best life… in Cancun!” manner but in doing things that matter, in appreciating the things that are often taken for granted, in living the life in front of you rather forcing a life you think you deserve.

For me, for right now, conquering life is going to the Wichita Symphony Orchestra with my mom and cousin, having a drink before and talking a blue streak, and then really listening to the concert. It’s taking advantage of my new gig and getting out to shows both for work and for pleasure. It’s organizing my time to thoroughly enjoy working out and writing and podcasting. It’s looking for my own place and anticipating pulling my few worldly possessions out of storage. It’s spending time with my dad before he conquers death.

This is the life I have rather than the life I think I deserve because, let’s be honest, none of us deserves anything. We earn it, we embrace it, we settle into it. I’ll always be looking to conquer life because death is coming. It’ll get here whenever it wants and, hopefully, it’ll have to wait until I’m done doing something cool and wonderful before it invites me to discover the undiscovered country.

I’m good with that.