I'm Not Much of a Preacher

http://blogs.salon.com/0001772/

My grandfather passed away a couple of weeks ago. He was a life long smoker who refused to give it up even right to the end. Even after they told him it would help his chances of living, he still refused to give them up. We were told that he probably only had a year or two left, but then a couple of weeks later, he just stopped living. They say it might have been a stroke, but no one is really all that sure. I think because of the shape he was in, we were all expecting the phone call at any moment. When I first heard the news, it was upsetting, but not life altering, it wasn't unexpected and we weren't all that close, but it was still a bit of a cold slap to the mouth.

While I sat in the funeral home and listened to the Johnny Cash song my father picked to play, I kept looking around the room. Sad faces, but nothing crushing. I thought about my father and how with each passing year, he looks more and more like his father, and with each passing year and each passing cigarette, he is closer and closer to having the same thing happen to him. The preacher spoke and opened up his salvo with today's GoogleTube, and then proceeded to live up to that with each word he spoke. After, he was done talking though, I immediately thought of myself, which I guess (or at least to ease my mind of being too self absorbed) everyone tends to do at these kind of things.

I promise, I didn't want this to be one of those "I have to deal with my own mortality because of the mortality of others" things, but it really my own mortality was the first thing I thought of. I wondered if I died tomorrow, what would people think about my life. I think at this point, people would talk about how young I was, and how I left a young wife behind and how I had so much more to accomplish. But I'm starting to fear that even if I die at 38 or 48 or 98, people are still going to talk about how I had so much more to accomplish. I have been dogged by the word potential since I was a kid in the talented and gifted program at my elementary school, and now I'm starting to wonder if I will die with all that unfulfilled. I think that's the problem with people having high expectations of you, is that they expect you to do things, and even when you don't do the things they expect, they still just keep expecting. Almost makes you want to take up smoking.