They tell me you are better off
Where you are now
Well, I don’t care
They tell me that your pain is gone
Where you are now
Well, you left it here

One of the best things about this Interweb thing is the power for people to post, raw and unedited. If you’re looking for good writing — well, there’s a lot more shit to wade through to get to it. But for emotional memory, this is it. It’s like stumbling onto a gigantic meta-diary for the world.

When a blog writer dies, it’s a bit eerie. You can’t always tell if they’ve just grown bored with having a public diary, if they’ve taken an extended break… or if they’re gone. In some cases, you can follow other links from their pages to find notes from friends; in at least one case, the blog of a murder victim helped lead to his killer (if I could find the link in my giant list of archived things, I’d post it).

But reading things like this
are what really inspire me. Not death, or even an online obit from a close friend — but the raw emotion and pain that the medium allows. This is the sort of thing you rarely if ever find in print, edited and sanitized as print tends to be.

And it seems so much more real and pure to me. Perhaps the timeliness of the reading (today versus one or two months out); but more likely, the fact that the words and thoughts and tears are not filtered through editors.

And the whole thing reminds me of meeting Melissa just a few weeks before her grandmother died. I never met her (she had advanced stages of cancer, and so it just never was the right time, too early in the relationship). But I remember after she died, the stories I’d hear in the immediate afterwards — and it was a rough time to be in a new relationship with someone, but something I wouldn’t trade, because I think death brings such real and true emotion to the surface. Years later, you get a whitewashed version of the person, as most of the negative has been ignored or forgotten, but right away, the emotions are too strong to allow for conscious editing, and I think that you get the truest version of that person, as seen through the eyes of others.

In fact, I wrote a song about it. Wanna hear it? Here it go:

I did not know you, our lives never touched
‘Til the day they gathered, to bid you farewell
And they painted your picture and as I looked around
I felt I saw you in the words and the sound

Your talent came flowing, through the stories they tell
And through the faces of those who loved you so well
Your life gave them a treasure, a piece of themselves
Something they carry, and still serves them well

Just one life, just one life, just one life
That is born, and is, and is gone, just one life
And I’m so glad to know you, as I know you now

Perhaps inside you, you were messed up like me
But to them you were whole and strong and a friend in their need
And what you left behind you and what swept over me
Says that your life’s work rolls on and on, a piece of eternity

Just one life, just one life, just one life
That is born, and is, and is gone, just one life
Did you ever have a chance to find out
What life is all about

I did not know you, our lives never touched
‘Til the day we gathered, to say our farewell

Okay, fine. Brian May wrote that. But it’s beautiful anyway. So go look for the Back to the Light album, and snap it up.

And then spend ten minutes, quietly, remembering someone that you never knew.

And then get out and live. If not for yourself, for those who can’t.