Sands of Arabia
A longtime friend of mine committed suicide. He took his nine month old son with him. The news has finally broken in the local news outlets (link purposefully omitted) and I’ve been reading some of the comments. The story itself in how it depicts my friend, and the things people say about him based on a single newspaper article, is leaving me distraught. There is a lot you can say about my friend from a distance, and I can understand why people would feel the way they feel.
For me there is nothing but darkness. There is nothing I can say, no one I can blame, and nothing I can do that will right this tragedy. What was, I know to be, a toxic relationship between my friend and the mother of his child turned out as horribly as I can imagine. We all failed him and his son.
This whole episode has me thinking a lot about the value of life. How precious that improbable gift is. It is heartbreaking that my friend never lived past 25 and his son past 9 months. I don’t believe in an afterlife or a higher being. I just believe in what we have now, and all we have is ourselves and each other.
In the opening words of Richard Dawkins book Unweaving the Rainbow, he says:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
Regardless of what you might say about how he and his son died, it weighs heavy in my heart that my friend won the cosmic lottery—in simply being born—and threw it all away. All of us living have won that same lottery; we should all celebrate it every single day. Stephen and Wyatt, you will be missed.
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