I wrote this some time ago in a draft I never published:

I sometimes wish, as I do right now, that there were some way that my death could be helpful to someone, or preferably a lot of people. You know? I wish there were a way I could be totally annihilated to serve some higher purpose, or at least something bigger than myself. And I ain’t talking about war, though I don’t exactly know what the other thing would be either. Is this an insane and childish impulse to have? Probably it is. . . .

Truth be told, I’ve seen enough, and though I have many regrets, I have got them off my tail the best way I know how: I MADE AMENDS if it involved another person. They were owed it. And when I do perish, I have made sure that the people I have wronged will never have to wonder if I was remorseful and sorry for what I did to them, because I was and am.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that I paid my debts, and I’m Ready. To be clear, I don’t have a death wish. But if something killed me swiftly, and at minimum they could harvest my organs or whatever, as they clean me up from the front of the bus, I wouldn’t necessarily be sad about it (never mind that I wouldn’t be around to feel anything about it at all). I just hope that in death I can achieve something with it. It is not vanity. I would actually take a bullet in the chest if it meant someone else didn’t have to . . .

Why didn’t I publish it? Because as I rightly predicted back then, the whole thing is childish, and also I figured I didn’t want to worry anyone. Now I have absolutely nothing to lose, which in some ways makes me impervious to pretty much everything. In my mind I’m living on borrowed time. What else could the world possibly do to me? Kill me? I’m already dead. You can’t kill what’s already dead! Put another way: the worst that could happen is that I lose my life. And I got that for free!

In Savannah I told my friend something annoying, which she did find annoying (“Ryan, shut up”), which is that I think of myself as a non-entity and my only function is to help people as much as I can until I die. It’s true! I hate to say it, but I just don’t care about my own life anymore, or what happens to me. I told her that too, and she told me to shut up again. As I wrote in my embarrassing diatribe above, that does not mean I have a death wish. Though I do pause before coffin warehouses, and bring up the rear of every funeral I meet, I am not going to throw myself upon my sword, so to speak. I have things I need to accomplish first . . . or anyway that’s the lie I tell myself, or else I wouldn’t bother to get out of bed in the morning.

But when I do go to my reward, however long from now that is, and however stupid and misguided this sentiment is, I still hope my death helps someone. Isn’t that one of the major tenets of Christianity? I can get down with that. Certainly there are worse ideas to subscribe to.

Just make sure they bury whatever is left of me, even just my bones or the dust of those bones, at the foot of the volcano Mount Terror in Antarctica as stipulated in my will. I’m serious as a heart attack. Hah!

Anyway . . .