Dying Too Soon

FREIDRICH NIETZSCHE SAID that some people live too long, and some people don't live long enough. He himself lived to sixty, which for him might have been just about right. The recent jet liner disaster in Ethiopia was reportedly loaded with the best, brightest, and most talented of young people. Included were a delegation of United nations workers, determined to change the world, to make the world a better place. Also, an award winning writer. then too, the pilots themselves. One hundred and fifty seven souls who had so more to live and give, but now never will. The good and the talented often die too young. what about Mozart? what about Gershwin? both died before reaching the age of forty, seemingly with so much more great music to create. what masterpieces were within them, never to be composed nor performed? Or, maybe they were finished. often times creativity is a phenomenon of the young, whose production slows with age. someone once said of Einstein, cruelly, that he could have spent the last half of his life fishing, and science would not have suffered. several of my dearest friends died decades ago, at very young ages, in the prime of life. they left behind young children, a much diminished world, and an unknown abundance of unfulfilled promise. Robert was a bit weird, but brilliant. A high school recluse, he preferred reading, classical music, and playing war games with toy soldiers on dirt covered tables in his grandparents basement. He married, and had two children, both of whom must be at least forty by now, and I hope and trust that they are happy, healthy, and successful. Robert died suddenly at twenty nine in 1982,and I have always wondered what he might have accomplished with computers. Steve, a small business owner, died in 1987 at thirty one, my age then. He never had children, but his dynamic good looks, quick wit, and engaging personality would have made the world his oyster, and would have given him beautiful children. Now that I am sixty four, and never married, people used to ask my mother why I never married. She used to answer "because he's smart". Maybe, but I quite naturally often wonder what my children would have been like. IN theory the possibilities are endless, much depending on the mother who never was, or who married someone else. I wish her, whoever she is, well. perhaps, in some strange way, her children are part mine. In any case, as a retired teacher, I like to think of myself as having had many, many children, part time. A high percentage of all the people who have ever lived are alive now. And behind every one of us stands the ghost of not only our nesters, but also of the people who never lived, the people who might have lived had our lives turned out differently. If there are, as some speculate, a trillion versions of the universe parallel to ours in other dimensions, there is surely at least on in which my children are born and thrive, another in which they die young, and yet another in which they live long, prosper, and reproduce, sending my chromosomes down the corridors of time into eternity. there must be still other universes in which I die young, or in which my parents are never born, and I never exist. and somewhere else, in some fine, much improved universe, the jet liner never crashes, Steve and Robert don't die young, and of their accomplishments, and all fo their children's children live long productive lives, and give the world all the blessings we here will never know. And that, I think, is the universe in which I would most like to live.