I am not about to commit suicide. But, since we’re now on the subject, I wonder if anyone has used their blog yet to leave a suicide note? Now that would increase your site traffic, boy. — Look, this is MY IDEA people, so back off. — I’ll have to check the patents.

Or better, don’t commit suicide but say that you did. Then pass around a chain letter about this blog that you found where the guy wrote his last kiss-my-a$$ entry to the world and then offed himself. Most people, conditioned to find entertainment in anything, just won’t be able to help themselves but look. Your site traffic would get a healthy boost. Then, if you’re lucky, your online suicide note would reach urban legend status, and you’d get another traffic spike when Snopes steps in to put your little hoax to rest. Wow, is there any bigger dream on the internet? Lots of traffic and a listing in snopes. Thanks to your death, you’ve got a lot to live for!

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to employ technology to jazz up the humble suicide note. I mean, this thing is your last chance to say whatever it is. You can’t leave it in the hands of some grizzled county coroner and expect it to have any impact! Every step of the crime scene/mortuary process is populated by people who have been blunted by an endless stream of death. You can’t get through to them! They aren’t going to appreciate the anguish in your letter. The note beside the corpse might be the only spot of levity in their day!

No, you need to find a way to get your message out. Like, for instance, on your answering machine. Friends, family, telemarketers…they’re calling you! You get to be the first to break the news that you’re dead. And unlike a paper note that gets filed away in a manila folder with your death certificate, never to be seen again, this isn’t a one-time deal. No, this puppy keeps making your statement, ring after ring — at least until the phone company gets wise that you ain’t ever gonna pay your bill again.

So let’s say that leaving your death knell on an answering machine buys you a month or two of voice mail eulogizing. In my neighborhood that means about 120 telemarketers would hear it. And what group of people could be more receptive to your message about the meaningless dead end of life than telemarketers? Can anyone say Target Audience?

All I’m saying is, these aren’t the 1900s, okay? We have technology now. If you’re about to capitulate to survival of the fittest by self-guided natural de-selection, put down your quill pen, pick up the phone, and communicate.

By the way, don’t kill yourself, okay? It’s a joke. Humor. Ha ha. And in any event, DO NOT mention this site in your final note or message or blog. Like I haven’t got enough trouble already without becoming the World Wide Reaper.

And if you’re from Snopes, it’s all a lie: rumors of my demise were greatly exaggerated. Case closed.

Dot your i’s and cross your t’s. Squint your eyes and clench your teeth.

Holy is being set apart. Can you be partially set apart? Partially holy?

You’re set apart or you’re not, right? That means being holy is only about being wholly holy. Holy with a ‘w’.

Sometimes I think about dying and all that it implies. I don’t mean the final-breath-and-you’re-dead type of dying, but more like the six-months-left-to-live type of dying. The realization that one is about to be imminently dead is surely terrible, but the longer agony of living under a terminal medical diagnosis scares me more.

However, knowing that you’re dying months in advance gives you the ability to prepare for it: to spend time with family and friends, to make sure that children will be cared for, and to put all of your remaining affairs in order so as not to leave a burden on anyone who survives you. You get to be a sort of pyrotechnic engineer planning for the tidy demolishment of your own life. Find the beams that keep this place standing and set the charges. No one knows the structure of this place better than you, and when the powder goes off you want it to fall straight down in a pile and not leave debris scattered everywhere for others to clean up.

Attack of the imagery.

Anyway, there would be lots to do if I knew I were going to die shortly. One thing I’d be tempted to do is write letters to my children for when they’re adults. That would be my one chance to communicate with them as a peer, as one-sided as the communication may be. A young child certainly wouldn’t see dying dad as a complicated person in a tough situation. I’d want to leave something behind to let them know how much I loved them and to say that the hardest part of an early exit isn’t losing my life but losing the chance to be a part of theirs.

But as I think about it, I recall what Harriet Tubman reportedly told someone on the persuasion-end of her pistol, and instead of perceiving a threat I’m taking it as good advice: “Dead men tell no tales.”

Throughout human history it has been customary to die and then shut up. People don’t communicate after they’ve died: it’s creepy. Whatever I have to say about checking out early, it can’t be anything new to human experience. Just because I feel something deeply doesn’t mean it should be recorded or — worse, but just my style — crafted into a poem. The rhyming kind.

If my children are thoughtful, they’ll understand the broad strokes of how I felt for them — and how much I must have thought about them — by the time they’re adults. If they aren’t thoughtful, what’s the point anyway? I don’t know what makes me think I’m so special and my story so moving that I should clutter up my kid’s lives with the dying ramble of some wanna-be.

Or something like that. Trying some kind of Amazing Kreskin act by attempting to communicate to my kids 10 years after I’m dead could really backfire. It’s probably better to let others tell my tales for me. I’ll leave it to the uncles, aunts, and cousins. (Some of those stories will be more colorful than others.)

Can you tell? Six months gone by. Doctor’s appointment coming up.

Today is Tina’s and my 5th anniversary!

Are we still in love? Absolutely. Is it the same love as when we were first married? Absolutely not.

Five years ago I perceived going from single-and-in-charge to married-and-in-a-partnership as having some definite risks. Did we really want to be together 24 hours a day? What if our styles of co-occupancy were incompatible? What if our love went flat and we found ourselves miserable?

At that time, my love was the sort that said, “I love you so much that I’m willing to risk all these troubles to prove it.” This was a heroic, step-in-harm’s-way, give-your-life-for-a-cause sort of love. This isn’t a bad place to start, but it’s certainly not where we ended up. Eventually you’ve been married for a while and you know whether you can surmount those daily problems or not. And, whether you find them easy or difficult, you’ll need a love that grows from patience and kindness to get through it. Heroic love won’t last in long adversity.

Good news! We got through it! We figured out how to divide chores, when we should go to bed and wake up, what should be deemed appropriate time with and away from each other, and how—and for what—we should spend our money. But that’s just discovering how to surmount the potential pitfalls of two people becoming one financial and social unit. There is an upside, too!

Marriage isn’t the final result of love: marriage presents all the opportunities for the continued growth of love. My love isn’t heroic any longer: I don’t look to the years ahead of us and set my jaw and swear we’ll push through it somehow. Instead, I welcome the future and all the changes it may bring, and it seems natural now that we’d choose to step into it together. In fact, the uncomfortable proposition now would be facing it apart. Tina’s my first choice to support me through anything, and I want to support her through anything, too.

Is marriage restrictive to the individual? Perhaps from a certain point of view. But marriage also provides an opportunity for growth that the individual doesn’t have. You could ask whether the protective fence around a garden is restrictive to the plants growing within. It may look that way from one perspective (and to someone who doesn’t know much about plants). But if the ground inside that fence is tended by someone who cares, then the plants inside have a very good chance to thrive in a way the plants outside do not. I think that Tina and I are thriving.

When I was younger I thought that I was an interesting person. Unfortunately I was also conceited. Now that I am older I am not nearly so conceited, though I no longer think I’m all that interesting either.

I remember reading a quote from somewhere near the end of Oedipus Rex:

But high and mighty words and ways
Are flogged to humbleness, til age
Beaten to its knees at last is wise.

Right on, Soph.

I just read an entry Tina made called Mother’s Day Reflections. Go read it; it’s certain to be more interesting and original that this reponse to it. You should know that she wrote it on the evening before Mother’s Day; I’m writing this late Mother’s Day night.

Tina was right: for us this Mother’s Day was just as packed full of stuff as any other Sunday. I did try to be sweet in the typical Mother’s Day fashion: by getting up early to make her a hot breakfast and by buying her flowers.

But I didn’t do a very good job as typical mother’s days go: I didn’t get a card for her. (In a way I want to get defensive and say that cards are only for people who want credit for remembering the holiday but who don’t get up early to make breakfast or didn’t think far enough ahead to send flowers. However, it is a traditional thing to do and I didn’t do it.) I was feeling pretty bad about that. How can you mess up a little thing like getting a card? It doesn’t mean much unless something more meaningful is placed behind it, but it’s tradition, so why didn’t I somehow find a way to get her one?

Now that I’ve read Tina’s Mother’s Day Reflections I think that my worrying over not coming through with what’s traditional misses the mark. I’ve been fussing over celebrating one side of Tina (her motherhood) in some very traditional (uncreative) ways. But if I were to make a guess, she doesn’t want to be left alone to sleep in: she wants to be woken early and driven to the beach. We’ve had a lot of fun in the past walking down the main streets of small sea-side towns.

Guessing again, I doubt that she wants me to take Cora to the park for the afternoon so that mommy can have a few hours to herself. Instead, we need to go to the local recreation center that has the halfpipes and grind rails. Let mommy get out her old skateboard (and a lot of extra pads, please!) and show Cora what made her feel alive when she was a kid.

Finally, instead of taking mom out to dinner so that she can escape her cooking and cleaning chores for one special night, we should have thrown the biggest community cookout of the year. We have neighbors on the front, back, and sides that we barely know. Tina would have loved meeting them and playing host with some shish kebabs and a tub full of home made ice cream.

What do you think about any of those ideas for next year, hon?

Our obligation is to live a life pleasing to the Lord. That doesn’t mean that we must live according to the fashions of the Christian community. If our true obligations boil down to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God,” then we don’t necessarily have to be Bible scholars or teachers or even “involved” in some particular church ministry.

Cora has more and more words that she can say now. Actually, she has more and more words that she wants to use, but the same small number of sounds that she can make. As a result, she makes her few sounds and thinks that she’s saying the words themselves. Imagine a vocabulary of 20 words and only the sounds ba, buh, da, dada, hmm, mmn, muh, mum, and nnh to communicate them with. “Mmn” means yes and “nnh” means no, and the rest are up for grabs. Needless to say, Tee and I spend a good bit of time with Cora in conversations that go something like this:

Cora: Muh.

Tina: Oh, you want your mommy?
Cora: Nnh. Muh.
Jason: What’s muh?
Cora: (starting to fuss) Muh? Muh? Muh?
Tina: Milk? You want your bottle?
Cora: Mmn! Muh.

Anyway, I got to wondering what Cora’s weblog entries would look like, were she so inclined to write them. I took a stab at creating a weblog for her here.

When Cora was tiny and I’d hold her bottle for her, she’d often grab one of my fingers in her hand. It wasn’t much of a grip, but it was cute and I was happy to have my baby hold onto me. It felt like she was claiming me, and I was thrilled to have her demonstrate her love, however simply.

Many things about Cora have changed in the last year, and one of them is her feeding routine. She doesn’t often take a bottle anymore, and when she does she lets us know that she can hold it herself, thank you very much. It seems the routine of having my baby explicitly claim me as her own each night has passed.

It seemed temporary enough at the time, but her hold on me was more permanent than I had realized, and here it is months later and I’m still thinking about it. I’m still in her grip. I think I always will be, even though she’s fallen out of the habit of reminding me.

I can imagine a novel where poignant moments for the reader rise from the everyday activity of the characters. A finger-gripping infant could go into the first chapter somewhere to symbolize the dynamics of a relationship between parent and child. That grip could be used to explain why the parent works so hard, forgives so much, and loves so completely.

If the novel were careful to finish what it began, then I’m sure we’d eventually find the grown child hovering over the bed of the elderly parent. Even after so much has changed, their hands would still brush from time to time, saying I love you.