Each day, each hour is a gift. With my mother’s passing two months ago, I’ve been struck by the sheer number of colleagues that have died this year. Not all of them older than me. I wrote some months back about Michael S. Heiser, a blogging buddy from days past. An email about a potential author just yesterday sent me back to the Society of Biblical Literature necrology. This author had died unexpectedly the day before. Glancing over the top of the list, I saw that three people with whom I’d worked died in November. This was quite a shock since two of them were younger than me and the other not much older. The thing about professors is that you kind of expect them to grow old. To be old. Life is a gift, and it’s sometimes easy to forget that.
Both tenacious and tenuous, life is a mystery. Perhaps it’s perverse, but this makes Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” seem like a metaphor. In fact, those of us who read and watch horror generally do so with a purpose, consciously or not. It helps us face difficult things. Five colleagues in one year sounds like a lot. Someone in my family, younger than me, had six funerals to attend this year. Life can feel difficult at such times. Horror can be a coping mechanism. At least for some of us. It can be profoundly hopeful. The meaning of life can be elusive, which is why, the existentialists conclude, we must make our own. Existence precedes essence, as they say.
Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Undertaker; Wikimedia Commons
" data-orig-size="425,599" sizes="(max-width: 425px) 100vw, 425px" data-image-title="425px-Mort_du_fossoyeur" data-orig-file="https://sawiggins.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/425px-mort_du_fossoyeur.jpg" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}" width="425" data-medium-file="https://sawiggins.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/425px-mort_du_fossoyeur.jpg?w=213" data-permalink="https://steveawiggins.com/2010/10/24/black-monks-and-grim-reapers/425px-mort_du_fossoyeur/#main" alt="" height="599" srcset="https://sawiggins.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/425px-mort_du_fossoyeur.jpg 425w, https://sawiggins.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/425px-mort_du_fossoyeur.jpg?w=106&h;=150 106w, https://sawiggins.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/425px-mort_du_fossoyeur.jpg?w=213&h;=300 213w" class="wp-image-2313" data-large-file="https://sawiggins.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/425px-mort_du_fossoyeur.jpg?w=425" />Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Undertaker; Wikimedia CommonsOther than profession, one of the few things these five fallen colleagues had in common was my perspective on them. I don’t think they knew each other. Had I not been an editor I likely wouldn’t have known three of them at all. We live in a web of interconnection. And I don’t mean the world-wide web (does anyone even use that term any more?). Lives are gifts and gifts cross paths with other gifts. Such information, all at once, can be difficult to process. It makes me wonder why we allow wars. Why we don’t think of consequences before we vote autocrats to power. Instead, if we focus on that ephemeral gift we have, and how we might share it with others, appreciation rather than hatred grows. To this lonely existentialist who watches horror for meaning, that just makes sense.