The Jay Gatsby Theorem: on daeth and life.

Jay Gatsby, as my familiar put it, "is a guy that died in a pool."  But such was not the point of the piece he was in, and such was not the utter capstone memorable thing of a life; a secret romantic at heart, my familiar liked the unrequited love, such to sing 80s songs in the smoky ambience of an arcade, White Lion, Cinderella and all.

He gave his life to living above his station, maybe even a gangster sort, throwing lavish parties, rubbing elbows with high society: a Scarface house with a swimming pool, and he had to have his get there too, for there was his heart, in that gold-rimmed dissipation and flaunting of specie.

Can you see?  It wasn't his death that was the tagline, but his life.  In the interim, a death may be but a moment, but we have years with so many, years of memories, pleasantries and platitudes, sideways smiles and hellos and so forth.

Omar Sharif, and I remember one of my own going kaput on the roadside, slowly chocking on his own blood, some 90 minute response time from the rescue team--caught out on the roadside, the Green Hell where there is usually weak cell signal and a very slow response time, the middle of nowhere, the edge of a large tract of government woods, nowhere, bleeding in his lungs from a broken rib, slowly, slowly feeling the life escape from him.

Its a lesson hard come by for so many, to remember how they lived and not how they died.

The girl that was raped and killed circa Jefferson, too, the utter contemptible, loathsome horror of her end, punctuating what was a rather ordinary and happy life, that Melton girl.

We see too in Charlotte, gangland killings and so forth, temperaments colliding, perceived insults, and the inevitable gunplay, with young people killed, and the local media racing to interview at least one of the parents on air, in which the grieving insists the sanctity and loveable quality of the perpetrator, one out for utter badness and dissipation, remembered as a youth, when their balls hadn't dropped and they had never heard gangster rap: the Gospel of pimping and selling dope.

That was a quasi-Mormon after death sanctification, long after they had ruptured their little way through life, with rotten attitudes and toxic interactions with their others, the people from home think they were just swell.

Let death not be the memory, I suppose, is the underlying point, but the substance of the life.

I remember Gatsby as a pure wannabe, not as a pool death, but as a dubiously wealthy man who reached high in life; it is not enviable, but it was his goal, and he pursued it with vigor.  I hasten to lump coals on the head of the ones who thought Gatsby was swell, how he wasted his money and went after a bored married girl, seeming, from a dream, in service to his own wants, bringing so much ruin to his own person.

And we all have our own little dissipations--pretend not to be beyond that.

I had one go abruptly in a pond, and the ending wasn't the point for me ever, it didn't stick in memory, but the life, the hardworking unfailing person that provided for his little group.  Saturday mornings, yardwork.  Saturday afternoons, either a box of take-out flounder, or visiting distant family.  Sunday mornings, church, and not just tithing, but giving pocket change to the young ones, so that they could tithe too, that they would learn to give where it was important.

At the time that episode elapsed, I had my own head up my ass a teenager, but I was not so far distracted that I did not recall the substance of that family member, how their lives were not only worthy of my attention, but also worthy of my emulation.

Such is the question: what good do we take forward?  And in the interim, looking around in earnest, we find quite a bit to choose from, of the good, and these lives are not in vain, even with the stillborn, the dead before adulthood, the accidents, the overdoses, and other dissipations.

We are all but sojourners along the great wheel, and the death of one drug addicted young woman, does indeed leave a gaping hole in the lives of her familiars.