American great Satchel Paige famously said “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

This is advice I follow as a rule, perhaps to a fault. I tend to let things disappear because we all do. We all will. To exist is to vanish. I remember a story regarding Saint Mother Teresa, how all her earthly personal possessions fit smartly into a brown paper bag at the foot of her bed at the time of her death. This part of the lore seems like the ideal to me. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. However, another rule I have is that I like to break the rules.

Often. With a spectacular flourish.

I have a few things that always stay with me.

Even still, I don’t like to look back unless it somehow points me towards where I need to be going. Now is all we have, and it can always be taken away in an instant. The past and the future are places that we cannot live. Both feel like distractions from now, the only thing in a human life that is vital and real. So no looking back unless I am prepared to move forward. And no looking forward unless I am doing something to get there. In either case, I am always benefited by looking back to my friend Blake Donner. An artist, a poet, a writer, a singer. An idiot, a fool, a brilliant, colorful and chaotic alloy of ideas, hopes, and dreams. I have seldom seen so much human included in one person, as if the gods trying to fit ten pounds of life into a five pound bag. Blake was always struck, as he often wrote, “halfway between railyards and graveyards”, and “halfway between suicide and revolution”. Renaissance and Riot. There will never be another. Today is the twentieth anniversary of his death. There are few that I mourn as deeply as I do him. I know I will until I can no longer.

Blake died with three other people I knew less well, but must mention by name: Ariel Singer, Jennifer Galbraith, and Scott McDonald, all close enough to be roughly the same age: desperate, aching, yearning youth. I have told the story of the horror of their deaths many times to people. However, I am hesitant to let the dead become only Death. Today, I will simply say, they were alive. I always reserve this day for them. Reverence is the word I would use; candles, incense, and prayers and offerings will be given today. The reciprocal gift of friendship, I have found, endures even when the person is no longer in our lives. Love changes you. Once you have felt love, you lean out that way forever, like a little flower waiting, trying to find the sun in the dark.

I never really believed in various flavors of the Christian concepts of heaven or hell as presented to me. However, I have come around to the idea of a spiritual practice. Ancestor veneration, and some old gods. Faith. Lore. (Maybe it’s a waste of time? It doesn’t matter; I’ll be gone soon enough.) I think of the Great Hall of our Ancestors; perhaps it is more of a disembodied feeling, rather than a physical place to which we may go. I do not know, and yet I believe in A Good Dream. That is something I look forward to.

Dear Ariel has been gone longer than she lived. Next year, it will be Jennifer. And perhaps too soon, maybe even unexpectedly, all of us. “Rust can never rest.” August 18th has since become my anchor, a mortality tax appointment, my personal annual review for myself: am I living the way I would like? Was this year good or bad? What am I burning? What am I building? Why? Who, what, where, when, and how kingdom come.

The only way I have ever felt appropriate to honor their short lives is to fill mine with deeds worthy of annual toasts and boasts. To have humility and some grace in my failings, remember charity for strangers traveling through, and to stand up against things that are bad; fight powerfully against them, especially when you are bound to lose. It is important to have time for more sharing, more caring, and especially to tell their stories. After all, it’s not really looking back when it’s always with you.

Until then.

Memento Mori, Amor Fati

— Hrafn
8/18/2025