Death is not proud…

It simply is. Death is arrogant, sometimes swift, and often wildly unexpected.

When Death takes a fifty-eight year old man in the middle of the afternoon while walking down the street, Death is alarming. The man was a good man. He left a wife, Miriam, and a daughter, Megan, behind. His name was Michael Philippi. He was a deeply gifted lighting designer and a kind and decent man.

Death visited him on Dearborn Street Tuesday afternoon October 27 and took him away from us. The suddenness of his passing made all who knew him gasp. Nothing could have possibly prepared any one of us for this.

It’s hard to know what to think in the wake of an event like this. It seems there have been so many unexpected, too-soon deaths of friends and colleagues in the past several years. I run across their email addresses in my contact list and can’t bring myself to delete them, as if to do so would be a final erasure or a turning away of some sort.

Years ago I worked on a new musical that (to the best of my knowledge) never did get a full production, but it had some great pieces in it, and some deeply moving sentiments. One of the lyrics read, in part, “The dead get tired of waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for the living to live and do something! Do do do something.” Perhaps that’s what we need to recall when we are forced to face Death, that we must live while we can and not waste our precious time here on earth, here with our loved ones, our family, our friends.

Death is the one thing we all share, the one fate that awaits each and every one of us and yet it remains so… difficult for us to accept, for us to cope with. Even if a death is not a huge surprise or not completely unexpected, we are still shattered by the loss. And yet… We also, at some level, in some place, know that it’s an inescapable part of life. All that lives shall die. Cold comfort, that. Or, no comfort, I suppose.

What do we do? We carry on. We persist. We persevere. And, perhaps most importantly, we remember and we celebrate the lives the departed lived, and the lessons they taught us through their living and their grace. We cherish those memories and keep them alive through our stories. We lift them up, and in so doing, lift ourselves up in the process and recommit to living each day to the fullest and being grateful for our lives and try to keep the dead from waiting for us to live.

Namaste. Rest in peace, Michael.