Occasionally, questions about the meaning of life pop up like toast in my life’s living, and I am forced to face myself with questions of the life worth living, the death worth dying. The whole thing, the business of life – my life – what would it choose to have been, what epitaph would it write for itself?

Here lie I: I the great, the humble, the contrite, the brave, the more than, the not quite…I. Thinking of what I have admired, a force heavy with my lost youth tells me to go out with a large bang. Some reason, some quest requited, some pay back to the gift that is my life. I push away in these moments the thoughts that life has been burdensome, difficult. I seem to want a life-experienced requiem, an ode to my own life.

Perhaps I look forward with awe to some long or short-suffering exit, and seek a way of self-justifying; a way of externalizing, blaming; a way of being sure and positive, that I can tell my self I have been worthy of life. A cause for which to die, a cause for which to have lived, some sense of right and righteousness, a life which was, in sum, deeply moral whether any force outside of life blessed it…or not. A sense for surety in a world in which, I suspect, the concept is not discoverable, much less discernible.

Just in case, I want to be ready when I hear the call; I want to be able, still, to hear the call to martyrdom: for history, for justice, for life.