Sometimes people say goodnight by saying, see you in the morning, if that’s expected. This bugs me.^[1] While I certainly hope to see them in the morning, and consider it highly probable, even in a modern world, it isn’t guaranteed.

To me, all goodbyes are an acknowledgement of this fact. They exist, mainly, for the unlikely case that this is the last time. The intensity and duration of the goodbye reflects the value of the relationship, times the probability that it’s the last goodbye.

Thinking like this isn’t about fixation with death, it’s about appreciation of life. In my goat-like focus on whatever I’m working on, it’s easy to ignore the transient beauty all around me. Awareness of mortality — my own and others’ — is the antidote.

When you have a rose bush in your yard, or a vase of cut flowers, you don’t think, oh, that’s nice, but I’m in a hurry; I’ll stop and appreciate that tomorrow. (Or maybe you do: but that’s lame.) Because it might not be there tomorrow.

People often seem more durable than they are. In any town, there are reminders of this, and somehow it still seems like a surprise. Grandma; the obituary for a 40-year-old single mother, with no cause of death; the fiddler who gets in a car crash a week after the jam.

There are also people that just … drop. On the stop signs and people’s laptops in my community are stickers, “What would Lily do?”, after a beloved community member — a vibrant young adult with no preexisting health conditions — collapsed playing volleyball on the beach, and never got up again, leaving all the friends she used to bring together, and two grieving dads.

There’s the old guy who ran the second hand shop: a dirty old man in the most literal sense, a fountain of information and opinions, ensconced in a pile of junk and papers and half-eaten toast buzzing with flies. Even the kind of person who seems indestructible, like a piece of the town itself, is gone one morning, the shop boarded up.

I was in the city for a few days. In the lobby, a couple stood, amused, watching as we took cheeky photos in formal wear. The guy, twinkling, said it looked like an album cover. We said we actually were a band, and got talking, and then went our separate ways. A few hours later, at a random intersection of the city, we meet the couple again. They are about to get married: they are staying right across the hall. (A man bent double from fentanyl poisoning, holding a Tropicana orange juice bottle that probably contains something else, shuffles by on a skateboard: the contrast with the mood of the moment is poignant.) The guy we’re talking to is one of the happiest, kindest, twinkliest-seeming fellows I’ve met. I ask if he’s a meditator: he is, a fairly serious Tibetan Buddhist. I ask him what’s the secret to his happiness. We stand in the rain for probably half an hour, talking.

Two weeks later, the woman comes to a concert in a different city. The man is dead: an accident. But she doesn’t know if it was actually an accident. It may have been suicide, which was how he had just lost one of his best friends.

I only knew him for about an hour, but I still think about him often.

There are others in the same category, still with us. But I only every learned their first name, and the world is a big place.

Two of the first songs to move me deeply, when I was a child, both spoke of impermanence. One was Big Yellow Taxi, by Joni Mitchell. Specifically, these lines:

Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you’ve got, ’til it’s gone
they paved paradise and put up a parking lot ^[2]

Another was On The Road Again, by Willie Nelson:

On the road again
Goin’ places that I’ve never been
seeing things that we may never see again

My advice to you, kind stranger, is to treat everyone, the beautiful and the broken, as flowers that come and pass away. You can’t tell just by looking how long they’ll last. So cherish them while they bloom, even if you’re just passing by.