What Death Taught Me About Living Well and Becoming Immortal

Does anyone even notice when we’re gone?

Roger was born on November 22, 1958, and passed away on Friday, September 6, 2013.

Roger was a resident of Indian Hills, Colorado.

That’s ALL?

Roger Whitehead was a friend. I had no idea he’d died, for he seemed impervious to just about anything. He was an expert in very many things. An adventurer, cave diver, skydiver, explorer, writer, PhD in sports psychology, the list was endless. Beloved of his friends, a classic Brit with the Brit’s effortless ability to weave tales, down too many pints and still weave his way home, he seemed bulletproof.

Until suddenly, he was no more.

Roger and I met in 2000, right after I had returned to Colorado to attend to my aging mother. Online, as it were. We didn’t date, for he was a chain smoker, but we made fast friends.

It didn’t take long before Roger’s effortless humor and his sense of adventure had captured me as well. He had just returned from a fantastic trip scuba diving the storied Sardine Run in South Africa.

Much to his surprise, and later delight, I organized a trip to do precisely the same thing. I said I’d do it.

Roger has known, as I have, plenty of people who make such statements and never, ever ever do any such thing. If I say I will, I will, and by god I did. He was impressed.

When I called to tell him I already had the tickets, he was beside himself pleased. Then he threw his energies behind that trip, giving me contacts and friends and what to do, where to go. I did all of it.

That trip was the beginning of my very serious adventure travel career.

Roger died never knowing just how powerfully he had influenced the arc of my life.

He had done that same thing for many, albeit not too many women. Mostly his mates, who took his chain-smoking and enthusiastic drinking as rites of passage, the rights of all badasses to do foolish things to the body and live on anyway.

Those very things likely caused his passage, too.

Roger was 55 when he died. By my measure, that’s horribly young. But he smoked and drank himself to death, all the while commenting, with his ever-present Peter Pan grin,

“I really have to quit.”

At fifty-five, I was just getting started.

I found out six years later that he’d died. No fanfare. Only the above toothless, colorless announcement of the passing of an extraordinary human being who had changed and improved so many lives.

Yesterday I received the annual remembrance which I’d unwittingly signed up for when I left my loving comments on something called “Tributes.” They, like so many death-related services, seek to suck money out of the mourning by giving us lots of ways to pay them for helping us remember, acknowledge or otherwise lionize the dead.

I don’t. What that notice did, however, was remind me, in a time of far too many deaths, death by COVID, death by gun, death by stupidity and racism and all the rest of it, that living is our best revenge. Living well, living out loud, living without apology is even better. For many, that’s awfully hard right now.

But the courageous do it anyway, in whatever way we can. I might point to the extraordinary life of Chadwick Boseman, who changed a great many lives especially of Black kids, whose sudden passage at forty-three was a shock to all of us who were huge fans. Colon cancer, and he had worked anyway, through the pain and chemo, with enormous dignity and humility. He knew he was dying, kept it private, and produced life-changing, narrative-changing work anyway. THAT is a superpower. That example is how people change lives.

However, men like Roger, and kindly he was a White bloke so much was already his by right of White, serve as a motivator for me to keep raising the bar for the quality of life. When we pass, we pass into memory. Forgotten so soon by most, and rarely acknowledged.

That’s as it should be. What Roger gave me is a lifelong love affair with much more difficult adventure than anything I’d done before. That’s priceless.

When I head out on my final adventure, I seriously doubt most will notice. That’s also as it should be. For the gifts I have to offer, as with Roger, have far more to do with whether or not others, hopefully, many others, will have chosen to live a different quality of life by virtue perhaps of something I wrote about. A quote I shared. A story that resonated. The example I set.

This is how you and I live on. The legacy of the quality of our life, the gifts of a transformed life are how we perpetuate ourselves in others.

If someone decides to climb Kilimanjaro because of my story, that is in part my work, in the same way, that my next trip back to Mongolia is partly Roger’s work.

In such ways we become part of the rivers of each other’s lives, flowing and melding as we move inevitably forward, reshaping our narratives and finding what’s possible.

I don’t have to be reminded of Roger.

Roger still lives on in me, as a spark that can’t die.

This is how we make ourselves immortal.