Stirring Point

On the morning of October 30th, 1995, 13-year-old Mark Vetsey of Arrowhead Lakes, Pennsylvania, reached for a shotgun stashed below his father’s bed. It was late autumn, and most of the red and yellow leaves from the nearby beech and oak trees blanketed the forest floor. The wind was crisp with decay, and as the leaves decomposed, a musky-sweet smell filled the air.

Mark, along with his older sister and two friends—Hunter Ruth and Matthew Coombe—played hooky from school. Mark clenched the shotgun, then tucked the butt into the crook of his shoulder. He jokingly aimed the gun at Matt and pulled the trigger, thinking the chamber was empty. BOOM!!!!!! Shock filled Matt’s face as he looked down at a large, missing chunk of his stomach. He grasped his gut.

“You shot me,” he uttered, raising his eyes to Mark one last time before collapsing to the floor and dying at his friend’s feet.

I was in school when it happened and heard the news the moment I stepped off the bus that afternoon. I sat on my couch later that evening, hollow and aloof, as the 6-o’clock news reported the story of my friend’s death. Mark, the shooter, recounted the details to me a few days later, after Matt’s wake. I stared into the casket at the viewing. He was laid to rest in his best blue jeans, a red rugby shirt, and the brown and green hiking boots I’d given him a year prior. The Charlotte Hornets hat I’d gifted him too sat alongside his left hip. Mark slipped some cigarettes into the coffin a few minutes before I walked up. My eyes refused to adjust, unable to register the image with any sense of reality. This couldn’t be real. Just a week prior, Matt was in my house, hanging on my pull-up bar, talking about making plans for the weekend. Now he was in a coffin. We were just kids. What happened to his invincibility?

On January 21, 2006, Jesse Grimes of Scranton, Pennsylvania, held his cellphone to his ear as each of us barked orders for him to stay put. On the other side of the line, five of his friends sat bellied up at our local bar, a 30-minute drive from him. I’d just returned home from a 6-month trip around the world, and our gang had gathered for drinks and a small reunion. Jesse was drunk after catering an event for which he’d worked and wanted to join us. We grabbed the phone from one another, pleading with him not to drive.

“Lei, tell him I’ll come pick him up,” I said. “Just tell him to stay there.”

“Johnny will come get you,” she said.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he told her as he sat alone on a park bench. “I’ll call you back and let you know what I’m doing,” he added, before hanging up the phone. The night rolled on, the drinks kept flowing, and the phone lines remained quiet. 

The following morning, around 10:00 a.m., I heard the doorbell ring and walked down the familiar steps of my childhood home to answer it. I opened the door and found three friends staring at me with tears streaming down their faces.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s Jesse.” The frozen vapor from Lei’s breath lingered in the air.

“He tried driving up to meet us last night without telling us and crashed his car in Bear Creek. He was thrown from the window and killed.”

We were 24 years old. He left behind an infant son. What happened to his invincibility?

On October 19th, 2019, after a 4-year battle with pancreatic cancer, Mark Whelan of New York, New York, took his last breath. His tumor forced him into organ failure, and at 54 years old, the cancer claimed what was left of his life. My father and I were sitting in a hotel room in Turkey when the text message arrived from a dear friend at home.

“I’m so sorry to tell you, man. Mark passed today.” I looked up from my phone and toward my father. I felt the tears pooling into small puddles along the dams of my eyelids. The last time we’d spoken, Mark and I talked about music, made crude jokes at each other’s expense, and discussed this trip I’d planned with my father. He was sick, but his zest for life was fresh and fragrant. What happened to his invincibility?

I carry the ghosts of these three with me as I move through each decade of my life. Their deaths haunt me, knowing I’m still alive—and, at times, fearing I’m squandering my days. Their apparitions have seared into the grooves of my memory, reminding me that I, too, have lost the last remnants of my childhood invincibility. Invincibility. What a ruse of self-deception! It’s a lie we tell ourselves to forgo the imminence of our own demise. Is it evolutionary and protective? I’m unsure. 

And now, as I stare down the long corridor of my life, I see the speck of death in a white, distant doorway, new to my view. A little black point hovers with patience, watching me as I slowly walk the hallways of my life toward its clutch. Death is no longer an event that happens only to others. Matt, Jesse, and Mark have become the harbingers of my own mortality—the albatrosses tied around my neck. I’m certain they’d hate this description and these words would send them writhing with angst. All three were filled with a lust for life, and the last thing they’d want was to serve as some tawdry foreshadowing for my own expiry.

Yet despite shouldering shreds of survivor’s guilt, their losses constantly nudge me toward a striving life where physical and mental efforts are now received as gifts, not blockades. Their deaths yanked me from a conventional existence, screaming inches from my face to wake up. I, like you, dear reader, have lost too many people to death. And we’ll both lose more. Yet I clutch the memory of these three with a white-knuckled grip, held tight as an example of how to live with what I’ve been given. I miss them, yes. Their losses sadden me. But attachment to sadness is no way to live, at least not in the long run. Their deaths are a reminder of how fleeting my own life will be and how I mustn’t forget the clear fact that I’m still here and luckier than those that aren’t. Losing each one opened my eyes to the great promise of “now.”

Today is not simply a dress rehearsal for tomorrow. Nor is this life a dress rehearsal for the next. The simple truth is that our DNA has run a near-improbable gauntlet to get us here. We’ve won the lottery. If you are fed, housed, clothed, and hopefully loved, then you’ve won the powerball too. Beyond our lives remains a great enigma, and while we like attaching ourselves to varied forms of otherworldly salvation, or a lack thereof, every waking breath is our actual and true salvation. This moment, right here, is our heaven. Being alive is our glory on high. It’s now; it’s today.

In his book Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dawkins sums up this sentiment beautifully:

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

What’s this all worth? I’m still reasoning my way through it. But at a base level, death reminds me that I shouldn’t place my hopes for happiness in some piggy bank for the future. Happiness, joy, and well-being are not things waiting for us down some distant road. They are not rewards to be sought at a later date. They are with us now, waiting to be felt and seized in this exact moment. 

Death reminds me that I must wake up and choose joy. To do so, I must be kind and aware. I can’t wait for a joy hopefully resting on tomorrow’s horizon. I can’t forgo the beauty of today. I must look for it in my cup of coffee, a smiling neighbor, or a visit to the store. And on the worst days of life, I’ll need to work harder to bring that joy to the surface. But to be alive and healthy is enough to warrant the effort.

I write most about travel because wise writers tell peons like me to write what they know. To “know” travel is a luxuriant gift, one stretching well beyond any hierarchy of needs. As I carry these ghosts through each decade, I’m certain they’d agree that my time is well spent with family and loved ones. And if I have the resources, it’s also well spent seeking and searching the world for an understanding of something beyond my own window. If there’s no understanding to be had, I’m sure they’d view “seeking” alone as an end unto itself. So I travel because I can. I travel because it’s a gift of circumstance I’m fortunate to receive. And I write about it because the world is gorgeous, even though it sometimes feels otherwise.

Every autumn, the bittersweet winds of Monday, October 30th, 1995, blow through my mind. I grapple and thrash at what I’ve done with my life, wondering how Matt would have lived if he too had made it to 41 years old. I think of Jesse and our conversations about his hope to one day explore the world by sailboat. And I think of Mark and how we traded countless travel stories over countless pints of Guinness. My ghosts remind me that I’m still here, they are not, and the world rests in my palm. What will I do with it? The way forward is to live with vigor, striving for—and seeking—a life impossible to regret.