WITH All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day this Saturday and Sunday, let’s take time off to pay homage to our departed loved ones.
Life is so fleeting.
Just as we are all transients in this earthly world, no one can really say or foretell how long our lives will be. Not even the most famous fortunetellers around can accurately predict the exact date of one’s death.
Only God really knows.
I am a fatalistic person. I believe that all circumstances/events are determined by fate and are therefore inevitable.
When it’s time to go, it’s time to go. Often, there’s no time even to say goodbye to your loved ones. We always just have to be prepared because we can leave this world at any moment.
That being said, allow my fertile mind to wonder why the good die young.
At times, we second-guess God’s will and wonder, “Bakit kinuha na siya ni Lord? Ang bait at bata pa naman. Bakit hindi na lang ang masasamang damo ang mauna?”
I recall some of the local and international entertainers from the past that have crossed the Great Divide.
Their deaths were deemed “untimely” – only because they died early.
The Good Lord took away flamboyant Hollywood legend James Dean on September 30, 1955 at the tender age of 24.
Dean, whose “Bad Boy” screen image represented the disaffected and misunderstood teenagers of the 1950s, gained cult icon status after his death from a fiery car crash. He starred only in three movies – “East of Eden,” “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant.”
Until now, I see framed posters of Dean’s old films, particularly “Rebel Without a Cause,” hanging on the walls of old-themed restaurants like Mile Hi Diner in Baguio City.
The Good Lord took away the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley, on August 16, 1977 at age 42. Presley died of a heart attack.
I vividly remember the “sudden” death of legendary martial arts artist-actor-movie director Bruce Lee due to brain edema on July 20, 1973 at the age of 32.
I had just stepped out of my second-year college class at De La Salle when I heard a radio report of the San Francisco, California-born Lee’s death in Hong Kong.
Lee, the founder of the Jeet Kune Do who was better known as Lee Hsiao Lung to the Chinese community, was my favorite martial arts star at the time – and even now.
Just days after his demise, I was able to watch a quadruple-header of Lee’s old movies at the run-down Vision theater. Undoubtedly, they were suddenly re-shown in honor of Lee’s memory.
Lee’s final screen work “Game of Death,” which also starred a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, was not completed until a year later (with an unknown doubling for Lee, of course).
John Lennon – Who will ever forget the late John Lennon, one of the four members of the iconic Beatles band from Liverpool, England during the mid-sixties and early seventies whose song “Imagine” has become the “national anthem” of many peace advocates throughout the world?
Lennon was only 40 when he was gunned down by a deranged fan, Mark David Chapman, in front of his home at New York’s Dakota apartment on December 8, 1980.
Then there was the death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, in Los Angeles on June 25, 2009. Jackson, he of the original Moonwalk dance craze, succumbed to cardiac arrest at a young 50.
Indeed, life is so fleeting. Just make sure you are ready when death comes knocking at your door.
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