Humans mark their lives with stones of remembrance, some rest heavier than others, it is true. The hardest part about living is knowing that death is inevitable. The challenge, then, is to live well, laugh often, love at every possible opportunity, and give no quarter to the reaper until, all avenues exhausted, you meet him with a begrudging smile.
To do anything less is to have lived less than fully.
When I hear of some creative spirit having passed, I feel the melancholy of inevitability… I grieve the realization that minds and hearts that have given much to us must eventually depart. But by far, the greater honor rests in uplifting praise and thankfulness for what knowledge they bequeathed; legacy of lives well spent, and most of them dedicated to that transient and delicate beauty known as creative endeavor.
It is, I think, the duty of the living to give best honor to the dead not by tears, but by tribute – for never has a creative soul sought to wound or bring ache, but to assuage both via empathy, identification, and the deft application of allegory, analogy, metaphor, simile, and the silken threads of imagination.
I miss many such minds and hearts, even as I only knew them through their works. I shall celebrate their life, their gifts, and their brilliance and to death only whisper quiet shaming that he ever arrives sooner than is want.
Defiance is yet stronger than despair.