Born to Die, part eleven

Last Friday a fifteen-year-old freshman was murdered in a drive-by shooting as he walked home from Palo Verde High School, the very same from which Rachel and Rebecca both graduated. A sixteen-year-old who confessed to being the shooter is going to be tried as an adult, and the eighteen-year-old who was driving the car has been arrested as an accessory to murder. Of the estimated 155,000 people who died last Friday, this one understandably received more local attention. In this series I have been contemplating my own death; what it may be like and what it means. But that young man who died instantly on an upper-class suburban sidewalk didn’t have that opportunity. This begs the question, then, of whether or not the nature of one’s death is affected by its circumstances. I’ve heard that when a well-meaning friend asked Henry David Thoreau on his deathbed whether or not he had made peace with his Maker, the philosopher replied, “I didn’t know that we had quarreled.” Such contemplation can take place only in a “natural” context, something that is not afforded when death occurs suddenly and unexpectedly. But what difference does it make? Dead is dead, right? Again, I don’t know the answer, but I am increasingly convinced that it makes asking the question all the more urgent.