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  • 10 Plays
  • Let Me Die In My FootstepsBob Dylan

Let Me Die in My Footsteps | Bob Dylan

Do not go gentle into that good night

Tonight I found out that a friend of mine from college, a professor still teaching at the school, passed away rather suddenly and abruptly at the age of 59. A great man, former military, who taught kids how to draw. He’d just returned from a trip to Thailand.

This is the second death that I’ve heard about by way of FB in the last three weeks and as the news of his death travels, I am both amazed and grateful for Facebook in way that I haven’t quite accepted yet. It has allowed the hundreds of thousands of us that were his students, his military buddies, his friends, and his family to share in our grief from all over the place. Some of these people I haven’t seen in several years—we keep in touch with the occasional email or the once in a blue moon phone call. In a way, we are able to reach out to one another, have something to touch that Tom “touched” even though it isn’t “physical” per se… 

Over the last few years, I have learnt about the passing of several friends by way of the internet—specifically Facebook—and have made much fuss over the inappropriateness of such notification. I suppose my opposition came from the fact that I grew up in a time when such terrible news was passed by way of telephone, letter, and in person. However, as time has passed and the breadth of my social circle has scattered itself across the globe, the quickness with which news spreads online has somehow allowed me to be closer to those who mutually share in loss—no matter where in the world they may be.

I don’t know quite what to say. The shock of it all is so fresh. To share the news is to somehow share with one another a mutual understanding of the loss we all share in the absence of the ones that left us too soon.

Where the light meets the dark

Death. The word has such finality to it. We, as thinking beings, attach so much weight to it and we live in a culture where the idea of living forever is hammered into our brains on a daily basis. Yet, what if death is merely a pause or a transformation?

Sometimes transformation is a blooming that we strive for. Sometimes we remove the clutter from our lives—possessions, jobs, or people. Stepping lightly, we do not grow teary-eyed from the shedding of the unwanted—no matter how changed we, or the world around us, may be. In a way, the death of our former selves is a celebration.

However, transformation is not always gradual—sometimes it is an abrupt splitting from the past. At times, transformation is violently painful and not at all desired—the loss of someone from our lives or events that irreversibly alter our perspective of the world. Sometimes we cannot say what exactly has changed, but we know we are permanently different. We mourn, we grieve, and we try to understand the void that now resides in our life like an uninvited visitor.

But death is death—no matter the light through which one looks upon it. Whether it is a joyful matter or one of despair, it is the enduring metamorphosis of the past into the present. While we too often look at death itself as a sorrowful event, remembering that it marks where we’ve been, whom we’ve been, and whom we’ve been with over the years allows us to see it for what it is. Every moment of our existence passes beyond us at some point, but leaves behind an impression imprinted on our hearts and our heads. Even as we travel from one place to another, prior versions of our lives and those that have been a part of them live on as the very foundation upon which we walk.

So as you grow a little closer to the completeness that will be your legacy, remember that the living and the dead meet again and again along the same line where the light meets the dark.


This is the April edition of the monthly newsletter that I write for the yoga studio I help manage.