A former colleague and manager at my previous job was killed in an auto accident over-the-weekend. I attended his funeral service the day after with other friends and colleagues from that job. There is nothing more depressing than going to a funeral on a dark rainy day among hundreds of people mourning and crying over the loss of a great guy. Being that he was Muslim also, it meant the service was held at a mosque in their traditions. It was a most interesting experience from a cultural point-of-view, but not being very good with crowds and small spaces, I ended up skipping the burial portion and going home. I also skipped the viewing of the body. Ever since my grandfather’s funeral, I can’t stand to look at dead bodies. I prefer to remember people alive. Their facial expressions, their mannerisms, their actions. I know people hold open-viewing to allow people to pay their respects and see them one last time, but I’d rather remember the last time I saw him, three weeks ago on the closing of my house. That’s what makes death such a sad tale. You see people and think nothing of it, and then all of the sudden they’re gone.

[08:28] *** [ Delta ] changed the topic of #BLEEE to: RIP AJM 02/03/87 – 06/08/14 You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

I’ve had a lot of people I know die over my lifetime. I’ve never really gone to any funerals. Funerals to me are somber affairs that frankly I don’t enjoy. I feel that remembering someone, honoring someone, these things are counter-intuitive at a funeral. Personally, I almost feel that I don’t even want a funeral. Burn my body, spread the ashes into space or something, and throw a fucking party. Have fun. Remember the good times. Make new good times. Sure, I won’t be there anymore to be a part of them, but this is the natural course of life. Sure, death still scares the goddamn fucking shit out of me. But I have no control over it. It’s gonna happen. It’s always gonna happen to all of us. Tragedy is it happened to this guy way before it should have. But nothing will bring him back. Our only choice is to move forward and carry those memories forward.

What hurts the most though, is the fact that I am such a awkward social recluse, that my regrets over his death stem mainly from never really hanging out with him outside of work at all. I didn’t really get to know him the same way his friends or family know him. Hundreds of people came to that mosque Monday to attend the service and see him for one last time. I don’t know any of these people. I’ve never even met his parents. I’ve lived two hundred feet from his home for three years, and never once went over and just said “Hi.”

Now he is dead. What the fuck, me?

Yesterday I went over to the crash site and left a can of Arizona Arnold Palmer at the memorial with some words written in metallic Sharpie. It was his drink of choice that I chose to try when I worked at East Point and developed a horrible addiction to. Between that and his addiction to Pepsi, also my soda of choice, he always seemed like someone I could get along with. It wasn’t always dudebros and fist-bumps though, he pissed me off in a variety of ways being the sort of manager he was. He was too lenient, too soft with some of the idiocy that we dealt with, and as Production Support, I tangled with him many times on matters I thought weren’t my problem. Part of me was pretty jealous of his position, one I felt was pretty cushy compared to the other shit slung around there. But I always had a level of respect for what he brought to the company, to his position, and to our team. At the end of the day, shit may have been rough, but we tried to find a way to work through it and not want to strangle each other in the end. That’s more than I can say for other people I worked with there. But people are different outside of work, and I regret that I never got to know him outside of work. I know he played a lot of PS3, a lot of Counterstrike. I know every time I sign on to PSN I am going to see his name up there, and over time, it is just going to continue floating to the bottom until it becomes the bottom-most entry based on time since last sign-on, unless someone takes over his account. His Steam name will continue to float on my list. I’ll probably never remove it, because that’s how I choose to remember those who have exited this mortal plane.

People will say the lesson here is to cherish the moments with your family and friends, because you never know what will happen next. I believe the lesson here is to live those moments with your family and friends, make them something to cherish or remember, but more importantly, take the time to reach out to people more often, even if you are tangentially involved with them, and just say hi. It’s something I am going to try to do more often. Because we cannot escape this mortal coil, but we can embrace it.