Ritter's Death Reminds Us of the Infinite

 The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Every day it's the same lesson. Over and over we learn and relearn it.

Sometimes it sticks for a while. We'll have an epiphany. We'll understand. But then we forget and have to begin again. And on it goes, an endless cycle, spinning like a toy top, motion without movement, life without growth.

John Ritter dies and I am stunned - not because I knew John Ritter and not because I am a fan but because he wasn't old or sick or on a doomed airplane or in a speeding car or in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He was at work, doing his job, living his life and a heart defect he never knew he had killed him. 

It's an old story. So why does it feel new? And why do I care? Why does the death of someone I don't know make me think about everyone I do know? And why does it make me feel scared?

Because when someone dies unexpectedly, the top wobbles and the truth becomes visible, the way a top’s colors and patterns become clearer as it slows down. And the truth is this: all human beings, even movie stars, are mortal; and everyone, no matter his age, dies,

We keep the top spinning. so we don't have to live with this truth. And yet, despite this, every time someone dies, even when the death is expected, the top slows down and we are shocked all over again.

Winter doesn't surprise us. We know that it follows fall. Snow flies, the roads get icy, our cars won't start and we lose our electricity, sometimes. Kids go to school. Adults go to work. Lilacs bloom in spring. Our lives are full of cycles.

But the cycle that is our life?

The lesson that chills us isn't that our lives are on a clock that's set to go off, God knows when, but that our lives are on a clock at all.

Here we are, surrounded by constants - the ground we walk on, the air we breathe, the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets. Here we are, a part of these things. And we think because they are and will always be, we are and will always be, too.

When I was 16 and cruising around Boston with Janet Butler trying to find some hidden prize that WMEX used to promote its radio station, I couldn't imagine that I wouldn't always be 16.

When I was a young mother, I knew I would be a young mother for a long time, not for just a few years. And when I met people whose children were grown up and married, I thought, this won't happen to me. 

We're this way with death, too. We can't fathom it. Because it's unimaginable to think that a person can be alive one minute and dead the next and no matter how we know this intellectually, no matter how many deaths we’ve seen, our souls keep refusing to believe it.

Could it be our souls are trying to tell us something?

How old was he? Was he sick? Did she smoke? What was he doing on that road? He shouldn't have lived there. She shouldn't have been alone. We believe that with the right combination of genes and luck and lifestyle, we can outwit death.

I look in the mirror now and I don't see the girl I was when I was 16. I don't see the young mother, either. But I am that young mother. And I am that girl.

Maybe our bodies are like snow that falls in winter. It falls in drifts. It covers everything. And then the earth tilts and the sun shines and the snow melts and seeps into the ground, and into rivers and streams and condenses and becomes part of the air. And one day the snow is gone. But it has not disappeared. It has transformed.

At some gut level maybe we know this. Maybe what we see in death that frightens us isn't mortality at all, but an immortality we do not understand.