Does Dying Really Hurt?
Lawrence stood well over four feet tall. That was his protective armor against a world that enjoyed denigrating people over physical attributes like height, over which people had very little governance. If he had said he was well over five feet tall, that would have been defensive and not at all funny. If he had noted that he was proud to be a short person he would have sounded both defensive and arrogant in an absurd sort of way. But making a passing comment that he was well over tour feet tall without so much as a pause or a notice was a brilliant way to diffuse the issue and make the listeners think the person referencing something as meaningless as physical stature was both silly and out of line. Lawrence won his battles in such ways whenever he was quick enough to anticipate a criticism and dismiss it out of hand as though it was not even a criticism worth raising.
Lawrence had dealt with this issue his whole life. He remembered only the best of the jokes at his expense. He was once standing in line for coffee and two guys were standing behind him in line. One guy said to the other, “can I borrow a dollar, I’m a little short today?” The snickering behind him was unmistakable. He turned and said to the guy holding out a dollar bill to his friend, “I’m even shorter today, so do you mind?” He gently took the bill out of they guys hand and paid for his own coffee with it. The two jokesters were so taken aback that they never said a word and he never saw them again.
The thing about being really short is that it is such an overwhelming part of one’s presence that it cannot simply be ignored. It can eventually blend into the background and cease to dominate the scene, but that takes time. No other physical attribute shares this aspect. Being tall adds presence. Being skinny adds gravity. Being fat causes mild disrespect. But being short is hopeless. It harkens a likeness to Napoleon and assumes an inferiority complex that is always working hard to overcome its “shortcomings”. Lawrence was quite well-adjusted to his circumstances and certainly to his diminutive stature. But that didn’t seem to matter. The issue always hung in the air like a questionable smell.
Lawrence was always careful to select his activities based on his personal strengths. This had little to do with his height, and always struck him as a natural and sensible thing to do. He did this in academics, sports and social interaction. Why would someone not choose to focus on their strengths unless they were on a specific self-improvement mission? Lawrence preferred to practice, test and assess himself in private in whatever he did such that there would be little surprise at his competence. There might be others who exceeded his skill, but he was sure to always be in the hunt, competitively speaking. He didn’t consciously treat everything as a contest that had to be won, but his experience was that if something could be made into a competition, someone would most certainly to so. He had spent his life learning both humility in winning and graciousness when underperforming.
People with a big nose or a balding pate could shrug and blame it on their ancestry. Lawrence wished he could dismiss his size in the same manner, but that would require him to know who his ancestors were, something that most orphans find challenging to claim. Growing up in a series of foster homes and an orphanage or two had toughened him and steeled his resolve to do something extraordinary with his life. Through Community College and going online to get his bachelor’s degree, he never goy less than an A-. He chose a mundane but interesting field of study, accounting. It was pragmatic and it would give him a base, but it was also fascinating stuff if you let it be. He had done every odd job imaginable, and done them well. His circumstances required that he work to survive and take his shot, so there were no fancy unpaid internships, just paying jobs. Eventually, his accounting studies allowed him to work in offices doing bookkeeping, which was little different from the odd jobs since it was the more rote part of the accounting field, but at lest it paid better than washing dishes. When it was time to graduate, he had his pick of entry-level jobs since accounting always had high turnover (it was a drudgery to many). Lawrence took to the profession like a duck to water, he floated above it and paddled ferociously below the surface.
People who knew him thought well of him though few felt particularly close to him. That was not an accident. Lawrence had come to believe that distance and detachment were his best path in life. But it did mean that his was a lonely path. So here was Lawrence, a college graduate, a CPA (he had aced the exam earlier than most in his public accounting entry class), a white-collar professional with a growing salary and accumulating bank balance (he spent very little of his money and lived very modestly). His advantage was that he expected so little from life and worked so hard at it that he always exceeded his expectations. It made for a great deal of contentment, but he never considered allowing it to break through into pleasure in the full sense of the word.
Lawrence was a respected professional, a man of letters who read a great deal and was always well-informed, as they say, and both an accomplished classical and honky-tonk pianist as well as a world-class amateur triathlete. But for Lawrence, these were all solitary endeavors. He did his work, read his books and newspapers, played piano and swam/biked and ran all on his own. It didn’t need to be that way, but Lawrence ignored the human element. He did so probably because he found people so unreliable and unpredictable. It was too much work to do otherwise. And then one day it all came to a screeching halt.
One day he was walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He was just completing an audit of the Metropolitan Club, one of the most prestigious private clubs in Manhattan. It was a different world from his small apartment in Queens near the #7 train, but a world that he had acclimated to over the years of working in New York. Today he was particularly pleased since the Club manager had told him that the Board of the Club had voted to grant him an honorary and gratis lifetime membership for his outstanding service. That had been a first, both for the Club and for him and he felt very proud. He might never use the facility as offered, but to have reached such a pinnacle of professional achievement meant the world to him. He was being recognized for who he was and what he had done. There was nothing better than that.
Just as he walked past Trump Tower, a group of MAGA hats were chanting some pro-Trump slogan and they stopped to notice the neatly-suited short man walking past them. One of them suddenly pulled out a water pistol, it’s fluorescent green color made it out unmistakably to be a toy and not the real thing. He pointed it at Lawrence and squirted him. Lawrence stopped in shock as the man repeatedly emptied the water gun onto his grey suit. Amid great laughter about the soaking wet midget, the MAGA’s restarted their pro-Trump chants and seemed to be done with Lawrence. As his shock wore off, he continued down the block. He ducked into St. Patrick’s cathedral to regroup. It was in that moment, sitting in the last pew of the grand church, that he grasped his reality. He was an accomplished man who had overcome all the injustices life had thrown at him and remained dispassionate about all that went on around him. Lawrence had been working hard on dying rather than on living, and it suddenly hurt too much to endure. That would now change.
He went to his office, neatly wrote out his letter of resignation and started Googling where he could go to volunteer for the efforts to unseat Donald Trump from his presidency.