Live Like You're Stan & Joan Lee

"Next door there's an old man who lived to his nineties and one day

Passed away in his sleep,

And his wife, she stayed for a couple of days... and passed away" 

-The Luckiest, Ben Folds

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Stan Lee died today... at 94-years-old.

I'll forever remember all the Marvel movies I went to see in the cinemas, anxiously waiting for Stan Lee to appear during his infamous, usually twenty-second or so cameo. He had quite the lengthy career, including a stint writing an article for Writer's Digest (here). I'm sure there are going to be so many articles commemorating his life's work, and I'm excited to read through and see how the media honors a man with such a remarkable career.

However, his career isn't the thing that stands out the most to me. It's his marriage of seventy years, to a woman who passed away not too long ago. This morning when I found out about his passing, his relationship was the first thing that popped into my mind.

He gets to be back with his wife, I thought. And this made me incredibly happy.

Joan Lee passed back in July of 2017. I remember hearing about it and wondering how Stan Lee could keep moving on without his wife, his partner, the perfect woman to him (you can read about her passing and their story here).

When Stan met Joan for the very first time, he knew it was fate -- here was the woman he had been drawing his entire life! He proposed to her during their accidental lunch date (he'd been there to meet with her friend, Betty, but Joan answered the door). They were married a couple of weeks later.

So, today, instead of mourning over the loss of a legend, I am celebrating that this man is somewhere in the beyond, reunited with his perfect person.

We should all be so lucky as to find our perfect person.

Live Life Like You're Dying

"Live Like You Were Dying." - Tim McGraw

Today is going to be a good day.

At least, I tell myself this as I listen to Reasons Not to Die (demo) by Jade Bird on Spotify while glancing back and forth at Word. And, man, does that sound morbid.

I'm not morbid. I just have extremely morbid thoughts sometimes.

Like the thoughts I have when I envision my entire life, as if it's flashed before me. As if I'm already ninety or one hundred and ready to wind down and call it a life.

I get caught up thinking about how fleeting our lives really are, and how we're all going to die someday soon, and how the trivial things that seem to matter don't actually matter at all.

One hundred years no longer sounds like a lot of time to me. If we even get that.

That's me, in a nutshell. That's been me for a very long time.

See, death touched me at a pretty young age. Trauma touched me when I was even younger--loads and loads and loads of trauma.

I'm a thirty-year-old who is sort of actually eighty. The eighty-year-olds would probably laugh at this--this young looking girl with cherub cheeks saying she's their age in spirit. Ha! Just wait until you're our age, they'd say.

Anyway, my mind feels like it's already eighty, in some ways. You know, the older grandparent (I'm not a grandparent or even a parent, FYI) who sees a young child and smiles at them with wonder because the eighty-year-old understands how precious the little moments are.

I value the little moments. I see the child and think, life is precious and fleeting and that child will someday live the course of their life just like me... and then I see the child grow and die. And it all flashes before me like I've jumped time. Until I pull myself back to reality.

Maybe that's why I understand how little time we actually have here.

So, I tell myself, every single day, that today is going to be a good day. I wake up like I've been on death's door, because I've sort of seen it.

And I think... god, it's a good day to be alive.

You'll most likely see me splashing through the water at the beach, enjoying a sunset, or sitting on a park bench with a scoop of vanilla ice cream (green tea or banana, actually, if they have it). Or maybe catching up on Yoga, my daily writing, or a long walk in nature.

This is my blog about how I appreciate the little moments.

This is my blog about how I remind myself to live.

This is my blog about how I don't take things for granted.

After all, today is going to be a good day.