Posted on 05/05/2011 5:34:23 AM PDT by Daffynition
May 3, 2011. This is a copy of Derek Miller's last post, http://www.penmachine.com/2011/05/the-last-post.
His server is overloaded, despite his excellent planning to make it future- and load-ready.
I got it from Google Reader, so it should be accurate, but I can't promise anything. I'll take this page down (and forward any remaining traffic) the moment his server returns to normal. - Travis Smith
Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.
If you knew me at all in real life, you probably heard the news already from another source, but however you found out, consider this a confirmation: I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming.
That includes my family and friends, and my parents Hilkka and Juergen Karl. My daughters Lauren, age 11, and Marina, who's 13, have known as much as we could tell them since I first found I had cancer. It's become part of their lives, alas.
Of course it includes my wife Airdrie (née Hislop). Both born in Metro Vancouver, we graduated from different high schools in 1986 and studied Biology at UBC, where we met in '88. At a summer job working as park naturalists that year, I flipped the canoe Air and I were paddling and we had to push it to shore.
We shared some classes, then lost touch. But a few years later, in 1994, I was still working on campus. Airdrie spotted my name and wrote me a letter—yes! paper!—and eventually (I was trying to be a full-time musician, so chaos was about) I wrote her back. From such seeds a garden blooms: it was March '94, and by August '95 we were married. I have never had second thoughts, because we have always been good together, through worse and bad and good and great.
However, I didn't think our time together would be so short: 23 years from our first meeting (at Kanaka Creek Regional Park, I'm pretty sure) until I died? Not enough. Not nearly enough.
I haven't gone to a better place, or a worse one. I haven't gone anyplace, because Derek doesn't exist anymore. As soon as my body stopped functioning, and the neurons in my brain ceased firing, I made a remarkable transformation: from a living organism to a corpse, like a flower or a mouse that didn't make it through a particularly frosty night. The evidence is clear that once I died, it was over.
So I was unafraid of death—of the moment itself—and of what came afterwards, which was (and is) nothing. As I did all along, I remained somewhat afraid of the process of dying, of increasing weakness and fatigue, of pain, of becoming less and less of myself as I got there. I was lucky that my mental faculties were mostly unaffected over the months and years before the end, and there was no sign of cancer in my brain—as far as I or anyone else knew.
As a kid, when I first learned enough subtraction, I figured out how old I would be in the momentous year 2000. The answer was 31, which seemed pretty old. Indeed, by the time I was 31 I was married and had two daughters, and I was working as a technical writer and web guy in the computer industry. Pretty grown up, I guess.
Yet there was much more to come. I had yet to start this blog, which recently turned 10 years old. I wasn't yet back playing drums with my band, nor was I a podcaster (since there was no podcasting, nor an iPod for that matter). In techie land, Google was fresh and new, Apple remained "beleaguered," Microsoft was large and in charge, and Facebook and Twitter were several years from existing at all. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity were three years away from launch, while the Cassini-Huygens probe was not quite half-way to Saturn. The human genome hadn't quite been mapped yet.
The World Trade Center towers still stood in New York City. Jean Chrétien remained Prime Minister of Canada, Bill Clinton President of the U.S.A., and Tony Blair Prime Minister of the U.K.—while Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, Kim Jong-Il, Ben Ali, and Moammar Qaddafi held power in Iraq, Egypt, North Korea, Tunisia, and Libya.
In my family in 2000, my cousin wouldn't have a baby for another four years. My other cousin was early in her relationship with the man who is now her husband. Sonia, with whom my mother had been lifelong friends (ever since they were both nine), was still alive. So was my Oma, my father's mom, who was then 90 years old. Neither my wife nor I had ever needed long-term hospitalization—not yet. Neither of our children was out of diapers, let alone taking photographs, writing stories, riding bikes and horses, posting on Facebook, or outgrowing her mother's shoe size. We didn't have a dog.
And I didn't have cancer. I had no idea I would get it, certainly not in the next decade, or that it would kill me.
Why do I mention all this stuff? Because I've come to realize that, at any time, I can lament what I will never know, yet still not regret what got me where I am. I could have died in 2000 (at an "old" 31) and been happy with my life: my amazing wife, my great kids, a fun job, and hobbies I enjoyed. But I would have missed out on a lot of things.
And many things will now happen without me. As I wrote this, I hardly knew what most of them could even be. What will the world be like as soon as 2021, or as late as 2060, when I would have been 91, the age my Oma reached? What new will we know? How will countries and people have changed? How will we communicate and move around? Whom will we admire, or despise?
What will my wife Air be doing? My daughters Marina and Lolo? What will they have studied, how will they spend their time and earn a living? Will my kids have children of their own? Grandchildren? Will there be parts of their lives I'd find hard to comprehend right now?
There can't be answers today. While I was still alive writing this, I was sad to know I'll miss these things—not because I won't be able to witness them, but because Air, Marina, and Lauren won't have me there to support their efforts.
It turns out that no one can imagine what's really coming in our lives. We can plan, and do what we enjoy, but we can't expect our plans to work out. Some of them might, while most probably won't. Inventions and ideas will appear, and events will occur, that we could never foresee. That's neither bad nor good, but it is real.
I think and hope that's what my daughters can take from my disease and death. And that my wonderful, amazing wife Airdrie can see too. Not that they could die any day, but that they should pursue what they enjoy, and what stimulates their minds, as much as possible—so they can be ready for opportunities, as well as not disappointed when things go sideways, as they inevitably do.
I've also been lucky. I've never had to wonder where my next meal will come from. I've never feared that a foreign army will come in the night with machetes or machine guns to kill or injure my family. I've never had to run for my life (something I could never do now anyway). Sadly, these are things some people have to do every day right now.
The world, indeed the whole universe, is a beautiful, astonishing, wondrous place. There is always more to find out. I don't look back and regret anything, and I hope my family can find a way to do the same.
What is true is that I loved them. Lauren and Marina, as you mature and become yourselves over the years, know that I loved you and did my best to be a good father.
Airdrie, you were my best friend and my closest connection. I don't know what we'd have been like without each other, but I think the world would be a poorer place. I loved you deeply, I loved you, I loved you, I loved you.
I encourage you to go to the original post and comment, if possible.
Thank you for sharing your insights!
I am joined in earnest prayer for you, dear Coldwater Creek!
I have kept you in my prayers regularly and will continue to do so, FRiend.
Thanks so much. I feel those prayers from FRiends.
Thanks!
Thanks!
The whole stupidity -- or at least superficiality -- of the new age movement in general and of the Eckhart Tolles of the world in particular can be summed up in one word: realizationism.
Schuon coined this term to describe a "pernicious error" which nevertheless "seems to be axiomatic with the false gurus of the East and West"; specifically, the claim that "only 'realization' counts and that 'theory' is nothing, as if man were not a thinking being and as if he could undertake anything whatsoever without knowing where he was going.
False masters speak readily of 'developing latent energies'; now one can go to hell with all the developments and all the energies one pleases; it is in any case better to die with a good theory than with a false 'realization.' What the pseudo-spiritualists lose sight of only too easily is that... 'there is no right superior to that of the truth.'”
Precisely. ..."
The Wisdom of Over-Educated Fools and Holy Hucksters
<>
"[Tolle]......an ignoramus with a broken moral compass.
"Don't get me wrong. ..... I'm sure he's a "nice" man. In browsing the pages of his book, there is definitely some truth in it, but it is about as deep as a Hallmark greeting card, aimed at a mediocre level of intellect, and so interspersed with banality and error as to be functionally useless. It is fast food for the soul, if there could actually be such a thing without contradicting itself ("soul" and "depth" being nearly synonymous). It also shows that there are some very hungry and emaciated souls out there, willing to eat anything.
"I will admit that he is an awesome businessman, however. In that area, I bow to his superiority. He's up there in the stratosphere with Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, and Bennie Hinn.
<>
For you to be free, the mind must be let free to be itself -- not let be itself, but let free to be itself. The man who knows the difference, knows the difference.
"If anyone wants to know why I so despise the secular left -- why it is the mortal enemy of [our] way of life -- perusing this infrahuman dispatch from the bowels of metaphysical ignorance would serve as well as any, for it reveals the ultimate premise and goal of the left in all its hideously naked barbarity, which is to turn man into a beast. Entitled Science Friday: You Are Not That Special, it reads,
"a pair of recent articles point up the folly of making tool use the test of humanity. It appears that chimpanzees had their own 'stone age.' Around the same time the pyramids were being constructed in Egypt, Chimps in West Africa were using stone tools to get at hard-shelled nuts. It's not only chimpanzees of the past who use tools. It's long been known that some bands of modern chimps use sticks to tease insects from their hives."
"There, you see? This ignoramus looks at the vast panorama of creation and concludes that one of the seven wonders of the world is indistinguishible from a hungry monkey cracking open a nut. By this adamantine logic, Kos himself is nothing more than a grubby chimp poking his joystick into a cyberhole to satisfy his animal impulses. Which, of course, is entirely true, but that's beside the point.
"The self-confessed beast in question then asks, ...." Continue reading here:
The Subhuman Agenda of the Psychospiritual Left
<>//<>
"...This is one of the intrinsic errors of scientism, as it tries to pretend it can get along without final causes, even while habitually slipping them in the back door. For the truth is, one cannot even think coherently in the absence of final causation. ... [....]
"Metaphysics deals with ultimate causes "from above," i.e., the vertical, as opposed to the purely horizontal causes explored by science. Thus, one way to eliminate final cause is to simply pretend that the vertical does not exist, even though, again, the very conduct of science is impossible in the absence of verticality, no matter how attenuated. The moment a scientist has said "truth," he has said "vertical," and therefore finality, absolute, and God. For the truth of something is its final cause.
"What is the truth of man?
"Note that the materialist does not really eliminate final cause.
"Rather, he simply affirms that the final cause is the material or efficient cause, i.e., random matter and energy.
"That being the case, he is promulgating the metaphysical absurdity of "absolute relativism," or --------- the impossible idea that the ultimate meaning of existence is ultimate meaninglessness.
My mom is home to hospice, lung cancer. It’s hard to watch every day.
Yeah! Hooray for the ability to "know the difference".:)
<>//<>
When, from a view-of-possibility unknown to them, a whole species is dumb, how can any individually be properly so identified?
The answer of course is that they can't, and that only the doubly dense so involve themselves.
...Oh yeah, this equally applies to an individual, and his judgment of the intelligence of his own thinking.
Is that *your* blog?
The process is amazing. Hope you can be strong for each other. Observe and listen. You won’t regret it.
No, it isn't.
Whoever you quoted thinks of him/herself as a mere "animal", or less. Poor thing.
If you believe that Jesus died so that our sins may be forgiven, then you should not be afraid. I believe that God is a loving Father. Just as we love our children. He is so much greater than us and I am sure knowing our hearts, I would think he wouldn’t leave you out in the cold.
ping
What you say is true. I’m a born again Christian, and have perfect peace in this illness and dying.
Thanks for your post!
Finally, you answered a simple question. Amazing.
Have you or have you not read Tolle? Anything?
What are your thoughts about mortality?
Yes sir, I guess a little compassion and common sense can count for something –
just don’t expect it to mean anything if you stay in your room with your mind locked.
And speaking of locks:
Did you hear the one about the philosopher, the proctologist, and the mining engineer
who wanted to break the genetic code?
“Yes, yes, that probably too is all well and good, but I still await a reply to my earlier inquiry.”
Mein Got! .... the munchkin lives!
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