In older times in Europe, and in other places, too, there was a man in your community who by choice and by temperament lived more soberly than the others, and paid close attention to the phases of each fellow-being's life. After the end of your life, he would stand near the site of your body's burial and remind everyone of some of the crucial turns of your living.

Sometime yesterday a fit young man in his twenties was out on a bike ride in Reno, NV with some companions. He was training hard and rode ahead of the others. As they crossed over a hill, coming down a gradual incline, they found him in the road, unconscious beside his bike. He was airlifted out and today passed away.

The man was a friend of a friend of mine, who I've met on just two occassions: two of those long, rambling Saturdays where a bunch of twenty-somethings joke from park to cafe to yard to pub to park. When I first heard the news, I was stone-faced. Then, quite concerned about my inability to respond more nobly than that: shouldn't I show more remorse? Shouldn't I exude suffering in solidarity? But suffering can not be a mask I inhabit, to satisfy a social need for sympathy; that would miss an opportunity for learning, an opportunity to develop a response. Much better to be honestly untroubled, if that is my way. To be unaffected, though—not to reflect—would be a lack of attention to whatever of him I knew.

Death is assumed to be simple, if not easy, isn't it? The appropriate state is sadness, the appropriate action is mourning, and at some point you move on, forget. All too often we try to find a precise meaning in the death, a cosmic narrative lesson that punishes or forgives in its mysterious way—but we almost always come up frustrated in such a search.

This occassion prompts me to realize that we have much more power to live well than to die well, or to mourn well. I do a friend much greater service by living as fully with him as possible, being as alive and attentive in his presence as I can, than I do by scrambling to find an appropriate reaction to his death. It's a service I have been performing only passably well, and I intend to get better, to miss fewer opportunities for contact.