The Passing of Icons

What's up with all these human icons passing away recently? Or maybe it's been happening all the time and I am just noticing it now. Very possible.

Kurt Vonnegut...

and now Boris Yeltsin.

(Incidentally, it's very unlikely you'll see those two names strung together like this again. I love being unpredictable that way.)

Speaking of unexpected passings, strangely, I am not as emotionally affected by the Virginia Tech incident in a way that some of my friends seem to be. A Korean-American friend of mine expressed how personally she felt the tragedy because she identified so much with the upbringing and background of the killer and his family...as for me, I think my relative dispassion may have something to do with the fact that while a second-generation Korean-American, I do not feel like the killings had ANYTHING to do with the fact that he was Korean. People from all cultures do crazy, angry, vindictive things. Unfortunately, a lot has to do with the fallenness of human beings. We can blame the killer, the people who failed to love him, those he failed to love, the hate in his heart, the desire to get revenge...but I don't blame Koreans or Korea - and maybe it could have been prevented, but (in a modest attempt to bring me back to my original point), death does reach us all.

There is always an element of sadness or loss to the experience which is undeniable, whether you knew the person personally or only from a distance...I guess it's just very sobering to be reminded of one's mortality, how short life is and how deeply affected by and "agents of affect" we are to those around us. I thought alot about my own mortality when I was in Uganda. Death was so commonplace there. In way, it made things more real, more...visceral. Here death is treated so sterilly (not a word, I know), that it's easy to take life for granted. It's easy to become numb to living.

Maybe that's why I like reading about those who lived well. Maybe that's why such stories seem to capture the headlines.

We see better in hindsight, the life well lived.