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Live Life Like You’re Gonna Die…Because You Are!

posted by mzemait2 at 8:37 pm.

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I was looking at Facebook the other day because, well, I live in the year 2008. It sort of happens. Facebook’s great in the way that it has completely revolutionized our activities and social interaction. It blows my mind to seriously think of how different my life would be without Facebook. I mean, HOW ELSE WOULD I INVITE PEOPLE TO MY BIRTHDAY PARTY?! Dude, calling them takes waaaay too long. I’d rather click their names on a list. Because that way, I can also update my g-calendar at the same time. Multi-tasking, baby.

So, I was browsing my mini-feed. You know, the front page of Facebook that everyone was up in arms about last year, until they realized it’s really awesome. Anyways. Checking my mini-feed. Mackin posted a comment on Amy’s wall. Charlie posted on Sarah’s wall. Meredith posted new pics from her study abroad trip. Apparently Katie Blair and I have mutual friends and she’s PEOPLE I MAY KNOW. I have 5 friends signed on Facebookchat.

Then I looked at the Upcoming Birthdays section and realized that Facebook was telling me that it was my dead cousin’s birthday.

Wow. Thanks Facebook.

Earlier this semester, my cousin Sarah was killed in a brutal store shooting at a Lane Bryant in Tinley Park, IL. A robbery gone wrong. 5 women taken into the back room, bound and gagged, beaten, and shot execution-style in the back of the head. Sarah was one of them. She was 22. She just wanted to buy some clothes.

I won’t pretend that I was close with Sarah. We went to the same high school. Her brother was my age and in many of my classes. She did tech for most of the plays I was in in high school. We had many mutual friends and saw each other around school frequently. We saw each other at family functions and always got along pleasantly. We weren’t close. But dammit, she was family. And she was so young. Her death profoundly affected me, and completely changed the course of my final semester at college.

The week after she died was the worst I’ve felt in a long time. I spent Super Bowl Sunday crying alone in my pajamas and eating alfredo I’d ordered from Geovanti’s. Skipped most of my classes. Then I went home and discovered that Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church scheduled a protest at her funeral, and the rest of the victims’ funerals, and I almost lost it. At the funeral the pallbearers lifted her casket out of St. Damian’s Church, and the choir started singing “You Are My Sunshine,” and I definitely lost it. My friend Carl has a tendency to burst out into that song, and I knew I was going to hear it a lot, and it would never mean the same to me anymore. I went back to school later that night to see my theater troupe’s production of Oleanna. This was a great idea because I couldn’t handle being around any more sorrow, I needed to be with my friends. This was a bad idea because I didn’t want to deal with drunk freshmen at the cast party asking me “How ARE you?” and not have any idea how to respond to them truthfully without making things socially awkward (”Uh. Shitty. How the fuck are you?”). Like clockwork, Carl started singing “You Are My Sunshine” in his kitchen, and I knew I had to get the fuck out of there. I hurried home to cry alone in my room, and wonder if this would ever stop hurting. But I moved on, as we humans tend to do in these circumstances. I learned many things from this horrific experience, as we humans also have to do in order to make sense of such cruel nonsense.

WHAT MARY HAS LEARNED:

1) Life is short. Do what makes you happy, instead of what you feel obligated to do. Sarah’s death prompted me to drop out of a musical that I was mainly performing in because my close friend was the director, and to try out for a play that ended up truly being the best fit for me. It pissed some people off, including my close friend. Though I truly am sorry to have stressed out my friends, I saw that I couldn’t pass up an opportunity, particularly in my last semester of college.

2) Life is still short. Kiss cute boys! The realization of your own mortality is the strongest aphrodisiac. Give in to passion while you’re alive, because after you’re dead, it’s called “necrophilia.” The whole ordeal made me a bit more passionate, and I never regretted a single, hormone-driven moment. (”Don’t make out with your Brother-in-Christ“? Well guess what? I don’t have any brothers. You lose, Purity Retreat!)

3) I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Life is short. Spend it with people who matter. I had been going through a little bout of depression and social anxiety earlier in the semester, which I don’t really want to get into, but basically I had been paranoid that my friends didn’t care about me anymore. Sarah’s death jet propelled me out of my hole. I realized that my friends were people who care about me and love me and make this tragic world worth living in. I’d rather sit around shooting the breeze with the few people I truly love, rather than make small talk with drunk people at a party any day.

To sum up, nothing makes people want to live more than the presence of death.

I’d forgotten that I’d learned all of this until Facebook reminded me of Sarah’s death. I won’t lie, I clicked on her profile, because I was morbidly curious if anyone had been foolish enough to write a birthday message on her wall. You know, people who maybe hadn’t heard she’d died (but really, who hadn’t? it crushed our hometown). Instead I saw the last few posts of remembrance that people posted on her wall around the time she’d died. And then I scrolled down and read the ones people had written before she died. When things were … normal. When everyone I knew was immortal and our town was completely safe and everything made sense. And I burst into tears. It didn’t help that I happened to be listening to Sarah McLachlan’s “I will remember you” on my Pandora.

I still remember you Sarah. And I still hold those lessons close to my heart. I will continue to do what makes me happy, kiss cute boys without shame, and spend my life with the people I love the most. You still didn’t deserve to go the way you did, but at least this helps me to deal with that.

Thanks for the reminder of mortality, Facebook. It’s only a matter of time before you turn that into a new application.

Mary Zemaitis: I enjoy comedy. And entendres. Sometimes, Triple Entendres.