Joyanna Adams

Elon Musk, Henry Adams,& Steve Jobs on Death

“I welcome the sweet release of death, but I would like to talk to my grandchildren before dying”

Elon Musk

Nobody Reads

I was having a hard time today, realizing I will never have grandchildren. I have a girlfriend who just had another grandchild, and she is only 40. Soon, I’ll be 72. I was thinking about the rest of my life today, and how little time I have left. I may live to be 100, or I could die next year. So many people on this planet don’t live as long as I have. Covid and war, took too many before their time. When you are young, or even in your 60’s, you don’t think about death.

But today, I read this in Henry Adam’s book “The Education of Henry Adams.”

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“The last lesson, the sum and term of education, began then. He had passed through thirty years of rather varied experience without having once felt the shell of custom broken. He had never seen nature, only her surface, the sugar coating that she shows to youth. Flung suddenly in his face, with the harsh brutality of chance, the terror of the blow stayed by him thenceforth for life, until repetition made it more than the will could struggle with more than he could call on himself to bear. He found his sister, a woman of forty, as gay and brilliant in the terrors of lock-jaw as she had been in the careless fun of 1859, lying in bed in consequence of a miserable cab accident that had bruised her foot. Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died in convulsions.

One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion and poetry which seemed to deaden one’s sense and veil the horror. Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality at will. Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm., she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so willing. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the marketplace and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Appenines seemed bursting with midsummer blood.  The sickroom itself glowed with the Italian joy of life: friends filled it: no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows: even the dying woman shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fullness of nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence as a solder sabred in battle.

(I skip a few lines here and continue)

For the first time, the stage scenery of the senses collapsed: the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect. Society became fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanical motions: and its so called thought merged in the mere sense of life, and pleasure in the sense The usual anodynes of social medicine beam evident artifice. Stoicism was perhaps the best: religion was the most human: but the idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the Church said, a substance, but he could not be a Person.”

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Today I felt the pain of loss. I’d lost my mother, my father, my brother, my son, and two husbands, and was feeling quite alone. (The husbands are still alive) I thought of all the others out there who were alone, lonely, suffering…and I got a strange god wink from a friend.

A video tape I’d been wanting for some time.

During my darkest hour, he called me.

My sorrow lifted….while still there, I decided I needed to enjoy the blooming of the Missouri summer. I needed to save myself from my own pity. Okay. So I don’t have a family.

I…am…still alive. And still in the middle of summer’s softenss, as Adams puts it.

I can go outside and breathe the heavenly oxygen from my beloved trees. Who caress me with their splendor. And while I found a baby bird dead from its nest, the others were still chirping.

The flowers, the trees, the birds: life IS worth living, even in the thoughts of death. The thoughts of Why am I even here?

God has reason for me. And I hope, he shows me soon. As long as the wishes of seeing stars in the sky before I die, I will have hope. How can you NOT want to live, even if alone, on this magnificent planet called Earth?

And there’s another tech guy who gave some good advice, probably the best I’ve ever heard.

Steve Jobs, said this:

He nailed it.

And he gave us so much.

I don’t have much time left, but…well…a few more God winks and I’ll be human again. He gave me one today, in my darkest hour.

Wise men…Musk, Jobs, Adams. And God gave us THEM.

Is that not a reason to feel alive?

May 24, 2024 - Posted by Joyanna Adams | Uncategorized | Bible, Christianity, faith, God, steve-jobs-elon-musk