Most recently in downtown NYC, a beloved hero of sorts has passed away. Dash Snow was an artist, both graffiti and fine, and he died from a drug overdose last week leaving behind his girlfriend Jade, his daughter Secret, and a plethora of family, friends, and fans. Personally I knew Dash, but not well. Even when I did hang out with him, I wouldn’t say I knew him well. What I did know of him was his constant good attitude and warm nature. To people that didn’t know Dash, he might have been considered “too cool” but really, he was just cool enough. He was a living legend, a good name to drop if you wanted to seem like you knew what was up, but really he kept a very small circle of close friends and especially towards the end of his life, he was most likely suffering in a way that only few people can really wrap their heads around.
I feel lucky to have gotten sober when I was young. Sometimes the thought enters my head that “I missed out” or sometimes when I see people drinking and having a great time, I kind of wish I drank too. I haven’t had a drink in a very long time, but that doesn’t mean I’m immune to the wanting to do so. As time has passed it has gotten easier for me to avoid those cravings or at least become aware of them when they happen, accept them, and wait for the craving to pass, but I remember a time when it wasn’t that easy.
Most often when I think about the times when I used to get fucked up, they are not good memories. Sure, for years I had a blast, but towards the end I had wanted to stop and I just couldn’t. I would make deals with myself, compromises, and tiny little rules that I would constantly break. I’d say “I’m only going to get fucked up on the weekends,” or “If I go three days without getting fucked up, I can reward myself.” Of course I couldn’t abide by these fake rules and so I would bargain. “I promise never to get fucked up again if I just go out for one more night.” Each time I set one of these rules up for myself and break them, I would just feel worse. And the worse I felt, the more fucked up I wanted to get. I think because I was young it was easy for me to finally bottom out and surrender. I was broke, my “friends” were not really my friends at all, and I still felt like a baby in a lot of ways. I can’t imagine how much harder it would have gotten for me if I had kept going. I don’t doubt that I would have ended up in the same place as Dash, wherever that is. One thing we know is that it is not here, among us.
A lot of my days are spent full of anxiety and fear. Life is hard, period. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, or where you live, or how healthy you are. Bad things happen no matter what. The universe does not specifically dole out what happens or doesn’t happen to us. I don’t believe that it does anyway.
Let’s say you want to die and you want to be immortalized like Kurt Cobain. You fantasize about who will come to your funeral. You know you’ve done that before. For most people, when they die, they are remembered strongly by the people who were close to them. I think about my grandparents all the time and really just wish they were still around. I wish my grandmother were alive so she could teach me how to needlepoint better. I wish my grandfather were alive so he could help me with business and finances. I was too young to ask them about that stuff when they were alive and I hate that. I hate that they had to be taken away from me if not before they were ready, at least before I was. But at the end of the day, who else thinks about my grandparents? Sure my mom, maybe my sister, but no one else really. My grandparents don’t exist anymore. I think of all the friends I have that will never get to meet them, and they’ll never get to meet my friends. Maybe they would have liked Machine and Meryl and Bill. Maybe it would have been a life changing experience even. We’ll never know.
The elephant in the room when it comes to talking about death is that when they say something like “He’s no longer with us.” The remaining question is, “Well, where did he go?” And we just don’t know. It’s nice to think there’s a heaven, or a system that somehow allows us to see each other again in another life, but I wonder deep down if people can truly believe that. I’m not saying that nothing happens to you when you die, but I’m also not-not saying that.
I think the thing I most often forget is that every day we are alive, living and breathing, we are in heaven. This life we have on Earth, it is heaven. And yes, awful, horrendous things happen and most of the time we complain like we’re in hell, but the only proof I’ve ever had of a God existing has been through my experiences with other people. Some I knew well, and some barely at all.
When I feel like I’ve written something that has inspired a girl in another country to shave her head, that’s heaven. When I read a book and cry and cry because it’s over and I don’t want it to end, I’m in heaven. Tonight I sat on a bench with my two best friends and we ate sunflower seeds and laughed our asses off. If there’s another kind of Heaven then I don’t really want to know about it. I don’t really care at all. If I die, I die, but at least we know when the shit hits the fan while we’re alive there will always be a silver lining. We can chose to see it or ignore it, but it’s there. I bet my life on that fact every day. Any of us can die at any moment really, but today we didn’t.
So if you feel like your life sucks because of whatever reason I beg you to take a moment and think about someone you knew who has passed and is not getting to live it. As long as we are breathing there will be stars in the sky to look at, different colored apples to eat, and people who make us laugh until it hurts. I’ll wait for those days no matter what, and try to be as aware and in the moment as I can because when we’re gone, that’s it. We don’t know what happens so let’s assume for a second that it’s nothing. I’ll take a deep breath and maybe enjoy my anxiety attacks for a second. It is kind of funny when I think about it anyway.
Maybe people will say “oh it’s such a cliché” about Dash but really, after a while, they’ll just stop talking about it. There will be nothing left to say because a life was ended abruptly, taking away from us rather than giving. We are selfish creatures who want more of everything.  More good friends, more good times, and more good memories.  When you go away and we don’t get more, we miss you. We crave you like a drug. But that feeling passes too. If we don’t get our fix we forget about it.
We don’t get sadder in time; we get more forgetful. We mainly focus on ourselves and the people who matter in our daily lives. Even me, who often thinks of my grandparents, the memories have started to fade. Sometimes a smell or a song reminds me but that fades too. If we’re lucky we’ll get to see a ghost, but I don’t anyone who’s been that lucky.