112 – Dealing With Death

DEALING WITH DEATH… Thank you for sharing my journey, thank you for joining me on my personal path of being a better man today than I was yesterday. I’m just like you; I’m a guy who wants to improve, to be a little better man each day. I’ve been on this path of improvement for awhile, and this podcast gives me an opportunity to share my experiences and insights with you. It allows me to pass along the things I have learned and the observations I have made. It is not required that you agree with everything I say either…even if you don’t agree, you may still be prompted to formulate your own ideas about things, and decide how you want to live, what kind of man you want to be…and thats the really important part. It should come as no surprise, that things that happen in my life right now will have some influence on the content of this show. That is the case with this episode. Over the weekend I got the news that My Uncle passed away. He was my Mother’s baby brother. He was perhaps the toughest man I ever knew, A brilliant mechanic, a loving father, husband and brother. He also had his faults as we all do, but his laughter will be missed. So right now my entire family is dealing with this fact. I want to be very clear that I’m not telling you this for sympathy or anything, I don’t need your condolences. It did however cause me to ponder the many ways in which people, men specifically, deal with death. I handle death differently than most people I know. Many people, especially in our western culture really try to avoid the topic of death at all costs…they consider it a morbid, taboo topic. As though it is something inherently bad. That makes it difficult to have conversations about death in general, and I think that’s unfortunate. I never really understood this myself. People seem to focus only on the finality of death, on their own loss. They act as though every single death is a tragedy. While I see death as merely another aspect of life, an inevitability that we all must deal with at one time or another. To me its a completely natural thing that happens, just like being born. Every single person we know, every body…will be dead one day, including you and me. We can’t avoid it. When I watch an old movie I think about the fact that every single person on the screen is dead now. Every winter the leaves on the trees die, every creature that walks, swims or crawls will die and be replaced by the next generation…it really is, a part of life. So doesn’t it make sense to prepare ourselves to handle it in the best way that we can? I personally had a problem with death when I was a