This Epic Life
Originally published March 20, 2012
I’ve always had a thing with death. I suppose most people DO have some sort of “thing” about death, but my thing has a perspective that only those who have been seriously ill seem to really appreciate when I talk of it. For most of my life, death has been a terrifying prospect always perched on the horizon like a vulture awaiting its dinner.
It wasn’t until I was well into my adulthood that I could finally start making connections to my fear of this spectre and the time I spent in the hospital as an extremely ill child. That year or so, shuffling between hospital stays and “real” life, seeing children come into the hospital and never leave and not knowing whether I was going to be one of the fortunate ones, defined me in ways I am only now coming to understand. Having spent 35+ years fearing the very tenuousness of life, I am now able to embrace that same fragility and count my blessings each day that I am permitted to be with those I love, realizing that none of us ever know whether we will have just one more day to right the wrongs in our lives, or with those we love.
And so it is that I find myself walking rows of headstones in the local graveyards, appreciating the untold stories that lie behind each marker, and chronicling the lives of people I will never know with my camera in something I’ve dubbed This Epic Life Graveyard Series after a simple epithet I came across on one of my walks. It is, I suppose, my own way of coming to peace with something I’ve been terrified of since I can remember. And oddly enough, it does bring peace.
