Life is short, make it count
COMMENTARY
Kip Brown

A friend and role model of mine, an 18-year-old kid from Enid, Okla. named Kraig, has just died in his second bout of cancer. Having survived Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma my sophomore year, I was called upon in my senior year of high school to set an example for him and be his cancer buddy, so to speak. Astonishingly, he survived his first bout of deadly cancer with such strength and grace that I learned far more from him than he could ever learn from me. And through his sudden and tragic death, he has taught me something that even my own confrontation with cancer could not: I’m not immortal; I’m going to die. I might die tomorrow.

The way human beings have avoided this anxious thought is to repress it by focusing on other things. In the 20th century alone, many people have literally laid waste to the world in order to forget death and establish themselves as heroes in face of its inevitability.

One could even argue that most social problems — such as inequality and war — find their root in the actions of men and women raging against the possibility of death. Many theologians and philosophers argue that our own society seems to have constructed an immense death-denying illusion through culture’s idealism and neurotic focus on success.

Indeed, as I look upon my life up to this point, I believe I’ve masked the inevitability of my own demise with certain ideas of “meaning” and “purpose.” I always think that someday I’ll be important, meaningful, powerful and happy, but to get to that point, I had better work hard. I find that I have missed many opportunities to enjoy the present and be with those I love, but I sacrificed it all because I needed to devote more time to imbuing my life with future meaning. Indeed, I even missed many cancer walks which I could have spent time with Kraig due to “scheduling conflicts.”

Kraig had a lot of wisdom in this area. I can remember he once said that the future really didn’t matter to him anymore, but rather what mattered was the present, or as he said, “what is.” With a philosophy-of-life such as this, Kraig truly must have lived more days in his 18 years of life than I ever have in my 21.

But what can we learn from a life such as his? Remember that there are far worse things than death, such as sacrificing the present for an obsessive death-defying focus on the future. This is not to say do not plan for the future, or even strive for great things in your life, but it does mean examine your life and determine whether or not it might be focused on little more than denying death.

Kip Brown is a senior religion major from Enid, Oklahoma.