A sonnet about mortality

Although I’ve considered myself to be a writer for a very long time, I’ve never really thought of myself as a poet. I truly enjoy the challenge of stringing words together, and I’ve probably scratched out several hundred collections of thoughts that approximate poems over the past 15-20 years or so. They’re everywhere in my house, and at my desk at work, and squirreled away inside drawers that I might locate someday by accident.

I have a page on a website called Poeticous that has over 200 poems which I have taken the time to put into something resembling a poetic form. I suppose that someone who goes to that much trouble is more of a poet than he wants to let on. I’ll never be very good at it—as the long list of my Submittable rejections will attest—but then there are worse ways I could be spending my time.

All of this is a prelude to the news that I had one of my poems—a sonnet—published online today, in a collection curated and published on Substack. It was presented in honor of National Poetry Month, and as a longtime participant in the month’s activities—Poem in Your Pocket Day, in particular—I am very pleased to be part of such a collection.

The event that gave rise to my sonnet’s creation took place last summer, when a YouTuber named Ben Potter, who ran a page with 3 million followers, died suddenly at the age of 40. As someone who is a long way past 40—and who will never have anywhere near the level of followers that he had—it reminded me, once again, that life can be terribly short and completely random in the way it sometimes comes screeching to a halt.

As someone who—in less than two months time—could get to celebrate a birthday for an age which Abraham Lincoln did not attain, the concept of mortality is never very far from my mind. And so it was that, in the space of time between submitting this sonnet for consideration and seeing it today in its published form, I learned of the passing of a high school classmate of mine earlier this month, at the age of 56.

My classmate was a month younger than I was, and he was probably looking forward to his next birthday over the summer, just as I am. But while I still might get there, he unfortunately won’t. Dedicating the work to him, as I did on Facebook this morning, seemed like the right thing to do because, even though it wasn’t written with him in mind, circumstances that have arisen over the past few days seem to underscore what this work is trying to say.

I’m certain that his family and friends are now grieving this loss, and his absence will leave a hole in their lives that none of them want to accept. That’s going to be the case when everyone dies, because all of us have an impact on the lives of others. But Time remains undefeated, and there’s nothing we can do to avoid this reality. I like to think that knowing when and how we will die would ruin—or at least severely impact—the way we live our lives while we’re here. And that isn’t the point of being here on this big blue space marble, either.

So Cheers to you Mark, and to everyone else that I’ve ever crossed paths with on the journey of life so far. Although this work hasn’t applied to everyone I know just yet, in time it will. And fortunately, we won’t be able to know just how much time that will be. Until then, let’s all enjoy the ride for as long as we can.