Elegant Eulogy

As I grow older, I find myself more and more accepting of mortality. This is my position - if we stop kicking and screaming about how unfair it is, and let it be part of the calculation of what we need to accomplish, we would find peace on earth, and accomplish a lot more. We could be like Lupe Velez, as mentioned in the pilot episode of Frasier, and try to engineer our own glamorous death. Or we could live a elegant life and hope that traslates into afterlife.

My dad's health has now put me in a contemplative "what if" mood. Over the past month, he has fell out of bed twice in one night, fell in the bathroom one morning during shower, and has amassed a number of bruises from various other stumbling incidents when I wasn't present. This morning, he wanted to discuss some investment decisions, and I couldn't understand any of the words because of his weak vocal cord. There are flashes of lull period when he's normal, but everyday is progressively worse. I wonder about his quality of life if he lives like this for next ten years.

But I've moved away from my topic, which is about eulogies. Two deaths shook me to my core in last ten years. The first one was my Dominican colleague Bernard Benedict Williams (1948-1996) who died of a heart attack. 3 days before his death, he told me that his cholesterol was 240, and his doctor asked him to stop eating anything other than fruit. I check my cholesterol obsessively every three months now.

The second was Ahir Alam (?-2001), my producer colleague who died in a road accident just four hours before 9/11 happened. After an exhausting 9 hour ordeal when we tried to arrange to bring his body from Rajshahi, I came home at 2am, turned on TV and saw the WTC incident for the first time. Somehow, none of it made any impact after the shock of losing someone I admire. In five years, I've avoided going to Rajshahi area for fear of the emotions it will drum up in me.

Again I digress. In Bernard's memorial, one of his friends said that when he was going out on his first date in Dominican Republic, he was so poor that he didn't have a belt, and had to manually hold up his oversized trouser. Bernard took out his belt and let him use it for the date, and saved him from the embarassment. He hoped that, from the beyond, Bernard would always pull up his trousers and save him from embarrassment.

I can only hope someone says something so nice at my eulogy. Or pull up my pants from the great beyond.