Obituary 2021

I started reading obituaries in March of last year as regularly as I can. It strikes me that one sentence can cover half of a person’s life. Between all moments of joy, suffering, hearty laughter, food savored, and faraway lands, when one writes “Linda was a nurse who loved to cook,” it strips what makes life worth living. Obituaries in this sense are no more than instruction manuals, not in content but in form.

• Step 1. Linda was born on May 20th 1954.

• Step 2. Linda went to school, got a job for 40 years, and started a family.

• Step 3. Linda after retirement liked to do certain activities that made her happy.

• Step 4. Linda died last week.

There’s an idea about the three deaths: the first is when your heart stops beating, the second when you’re lowered to the ground, and the third when the last person forgets about you. Why write an obituary in the first place? It’s to remember this person in the entirety of their life. When an obituary captures solely the high-level events, it’s akin to dying that third time because there are no hooks to remember one by.

In this sense, obituaries are a kind of anti-instruction manual. Don’t live a life without creating your own interesting stories or else it’ll get written in the annals as a concise brief description like above.

So I decided to take on the task of writing my own obituary for the year 2021 to another self perhaps past or future:

Heat lamps were the starting point of 2021. I’m talking about New York City. COVID was a major concern and vaccines did yet exist for the wider US population. So there was a shuffle of regulations from the local government, one of which was eating outside only. And to do so you needed the warmth of propane heat towers. No towers and eating was in a freezer. Water, hold the ice please.

You succeeded in hitting your sales goal the previous month, and after realizing how fleeting success felt, you succumbed to work nihilism. The sort that whispers in your ear upon opening your laptop that what you’re spending a majority of your day on has no more meaning than scratching your ass on a Tuesday. All the days melded together like a gray malaise.

But all was not hopeless. With the COVID crew you assembled from your former job pre-pandemic, you revamped one major activity. Snowboarding. A six hour lesson full of sore wrists, a stiff neck, and dozens of falls turned out to be a spike of something special in the monotony. Two separate trips to Vermont and you had the basics of riding on intermediate trails. The cold wind can make you feel alive especially after working, sleeping, and often eating in an 8X8 room everyday.

Much of your dating life was flat. You went to the Museum of Modern Art with a girl. Didn’t work out. A girl tried to give you a handshake at the end of a first date. Definitely didn’t work out. Another girl continuously repeated the popular slang - “it be like that sometimes” as a replacement for “it is what it is.” Most definitely didn’t work. Dating apps felt like they were a necessary part to this pandemic, yet continued to disappoint.

Your roommate stopped speaking to you. She said you complained too much, and then from that point on decided that her words were better used elsewhere than basic conversation. Don’t take it personal – she didn’t talk to your other roommate either. Her facial expressions and eyes are a representation of what it means to let go of nearly everything. Completely slack in all situations. Sometimes when you try to placate someone, you only make things worse. What will remain a regret is that you didn’t confront her in person despite numerous opportunities to do so with the simple question of “What’s going on?"

April was the month of Chicago. You slept on sofas and spare bedrooms of friends and family. Leaving for another place had the excitement of new possibilities. At least for awhile. The gloom of work was still there. It seemed to follow you despite a different location like a curse. Perhaps you too were letting go too – for hope in a better future where your time felt used well.

Life was better. Perhaps not as perfect as your expectations of the ideal life-on-the-road but the warmth from friends and family did soothe you. And in-between the time period of putting in your notice and the actual quit date (a period of four weeks), your job consisted of training two new hires, something you actually enjoyed. But the fact that you could work much less than your friends and family also had a level of enjoyment to it, but a bit of sadness too as there was nothing grounding you either to the moment - a traveler on different dimensions.

You were offered a new job within your company before the quit date had come to pass. You accepted it despite a longing to take an extended break thinking it might have those same elements of training. It did not. But you only had a faint sense of this as you flew back to your hometown in California.

The feelings you had in Chicago continued to perpetuate into summer. Sort of like a learned helplessness where options are so limited that you feel yourself forced to go down this one path. Do things you hate enough and you start to hate yourself.

Fortunately, even while pitying yourself work-wise, you were able to see friends from all areas of your life. Friends from elementary school, from high school, from college, from the NUTmobile - this was a great surprise as the lockdown the year prior eliminated many in-person gatherings. Weddings, reunions, and any occasion with more than a few faces seemed like a sequel to a movie saga we had been hoping for.

It’s just that in-between those times you expected those times of happiness to last and take away the emptiness you were feeling when in fact this model of substitution could never last. Until August your pattern was to go to events in different parts of the country, expect it to cure me of my dissatisfaction after the fact and be disappointed when it didn’t. You weren't aware of this pattern at the time then but that’s how it goes.

The accumulation of this dissatisfaction and your 27th birthday forced another attempt to quit again. You gave a six week notice. And when your boss left and the new one came in those six weeks, you realized how much hell a boss, a authority, can have on your life. His method was one of a sphincter – push and push on his direct reports until something comes out so he can show upper management, which in this case was shit by your subjective measures.

As a way to prevent yourself from thinking about yourself as a complete do-nothing, dreams of Mexico and speaking of your grandfather came back to you. You had wanted to go to Mexico before you left to New York but considered it too dangerous. This time you changed the location from a small town in Mexico to one of the large cities in the world. Also, you were secretly afraid of other’s reactions if you told them that you were jobless in need of a break. The grandfather story was much more compelling and did let you off the hook for quitting your job.

With a lot of fear about the dangers you heard over the news or from other people in the US, you scanned your surroundings scared of any person within a certain proximity. The mental state you put yourself in was worse than your actual reality and had the effect of negatively impacting your goal. You would speak to far fewer folks with worry that they would find out about your conversational ineptitude and take advantage of you. But with time, your walls of security came down, perhaps too late.

Then what happened next was that you became that do-nothing. You didn’t want this to happen, but unfortunately it did. You stayed in bed far later then you ever had without any sort of late night shenanigans dealing with alcohol. You milled about in the streets walking for hours considering it exercise. You ate a diet with more inclusivity of carbs, sugary beverages, and grease. Moving from one end of the spectrum - work as a lifestyle - to the other - leisure as a lifestyle. Both were unpleasant.

You stopped what you were accustomed to learning as a lifestyle, I suppose. And so Mexico stopped its fun and intrigue, especially because you didn’t travel as much around the city. You stayed within your neighborhood and stopped taking Spanish classes. You just tried to minimize the amount of money you spent and in doing so you minimized the amount of life you were living too.

However, you felt a resurgence of life as this was occurring. You wanted to do things and take part in work again. With the lack of things to do, you felt inspired by the potential life you could live.

And when you came to the US, you felt great to be back to live among the people you had taken granted for prior. In Mexico, you were alone, and now you felt a part of something. There is hope for the future not just because it’s a new year but because you took the leap into Mexico. A leap into the unknown. And while it didn’t pan out into a completely fluent version of yourself, you may have received something better than you could have ever hoped for.

You are in this exact moment now - with this blog, too!