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Writer's pictureReed

Unconventionally conventional

110 billion people ever.

In the grand cosmological scale, the odds of you having been born are infinitesimally small. The right physical and chemical accidents that combined to make the stars, to create galaxies, stars, planets, the earth itself, life, and you are so unlikely as to be indistinguishable from magic.


The life that you had growing from young, energetic childhood relied heavily on chance, too, albeit driven by random chance and conscious choice. The food you ate, the trees you fell out of, the people that you met, and that evening under the stars with your boy scout troop combined into a potion to make you you.


The life that you had was paradoxically both extremely common and extremely uncommon. To the people that only saw glimpses of you in passing, or that never knew you existed, you're merely one in 110 billion. To the people that knew you, you were singular. Unique, and strange, and uncommonly yourself, unapologetically weird and kind and funny and generous to a fault.


To me, you are my father. Your death will not take that simple fact away from me. My life is just as unlikely as yours was, just like everyone else's, but they don't have you for a father. My sibling and I are the only two people in the history of people that will ever be able to claim that.


You told me to not mourn you. You told me your wishes for your body, and your memorial. You told me how much this sucked, and that you love me.


You died in the middle of the day, peacefully, with your child's hands in yours. You were very ill for a long time, and while that was indescribably awful for you and, by extension, for us, the way you died was the best death anyone could want. You died peacefully and painlessly.


It hurts. The world, my mind, my body hurts with the loss of you.


Your death is followed shortly by a hurricane, and the loss of my car, and probate, and surprises that I suspect will keep coming for years.


In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence. (Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man)

You uncommon man, you thought of yourself as the common man. Your life will extend long after the physical loss of it; you will live at least as long as I will, as long as my sibling, and as long as necessary for the world to forget you. But the world, I think, will not forget you any time soon.


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