Now That I'm Gone

Section 5

One day I that I remember was not incredibly important, not incredibly remarkable to me in any way while I was alive, but now that I am gone I realize was a moment that  I cannot seem to push far from my  mind.  It was ordinary, a day like any other.  I was cleaning off a table at the restaraunt I worked at, when I caught the customer's eye.  He caught my eye because he was dressed well, like a business man.  You didn't, don't, see people likle that in my town often, let alone the greasy restaurant I worked in.  And even more intriguing- he had been reading a newspaper.

        Most folks in my area have enough problems oftheir own without wanting to read other people's... and then there's the group that I was a part of, who thought spending precious money on a newspaper was a waste.  So anyways, between the two types you didn't catch many newspapers lying around.

        The newspaper was open to the sports teams.  No interest.  I flipped to the next page.

        This page caught my eye as I went to turn the page again.  It was filled with obituaries.

        I'd never thought about them before, really, but in that moment they seemed horrible.  Who's life could be summed up in a few short sentences, like a bow on the end of a package?  Someone who lived an average life?  Did my brother have an obituary?  Would I?

        It seemed like a gross undervalue of lives, of real, tangible human lives, that this newspaper had taken the oppurtunity to write about.  None of these people, I'm sure, had this little happen to them.  Esther Morris, there in the second column... She had a cat, maybe, or a dog, who loved her.  Maybe she gave flowers to her neighbors on May Day, or had wonderful cookies that she shared.  I felt there was more to her than the fact she went to whichever church, and was survived by whichever people.  

        I sent my heart out to all those people that day, something I didn't do very often.  Normally my heart was hidden, but that day... that day it shone out of my chest.  I hoped that Miss Esther, Joey Clemson, and all the others there knew that someone was thinking about them, somebody hadn't stamped their names on a page and moved in, never to think of them again.

        In that moment I hoped that I would have an article-worthy life.  Maybe not front page.  Maybe not even second.  But I hoped that when I died they could write an article about me, and what I accomplished, and what people loved me for.  At that moment, my biggest hope was that my life would be article-worthy.  

        Now I'm gone, and I don't think that it was.  And there is nothing I could do about that.  I was just another teenage death, someone caught on the wrong side of town.  I alone know what I really was, and now I'm gone, and there are parts of me that nobody will ever know.  Maybe Andy knows some.  Hell, maybe Andy knows most.  But there are parts of me that are gone from Earth forever, and I'm not just talking about my soul.  Did anyone know my favorite color?  Does anyone on Earth see a green car, or notice a particularly green tree, and think of Margie?  

        If I could write my own obituary, I don't know what it would say.  Maybe it would say all the things I know nobody knows, all the apologies I never got to say and all the people I never got to thank.  Or maybe it would be selfish, and I would just let everyone know what I loved, what I was like, how I want to be remembered.

        In reality, I know that my life wasn't article-worthy.  It maybe wasn't even obituary-worthy.  I touched few, and few touched me.  I don't like it, but I can't change it.  Not anymore.