A few lessons for the living...

Get the Point!

During my law school days in the late 1990's, I was gifted the book A Lesson Before Dying, written by Ernest Gaines, and tore through its pages within a weekend while enjoying how the author wove real Jim Crow era Southern culture into a fictional account of the life of Willie Francis, a Black Louisiana man who survived the state's electric chair in 1946—only to be killed by the same method the following year.

Gaines's book focuses on the seemingly quixotic quest to find its condemned protagonist, Jefferson, becoming an honorable man instead of the poorly educated "animal" that the local racist society condescendingly deemed him to be before his date with the executioner. 

By the time I read this Pulitzer Prize nominated classic, I had seen my share of death and dying, which included my maternal grandmother, Helen Williams, my maternal great grandparents, Charlie and Irene Williams, and my childhood best friend, Chris Henry—among at least a dozen other kin, friends, and mentors; I had visited the dying on their death beds, and born more than a few palls at graveside services across Florida and Georgia. Suffice it to say that at 24 years old in early ‘97, I knew death, and had developed a stoicism of sorts that would serve me well from ages 26-28 while serving as a pallbearer at the funerals of my aunt, Michelle Hobbs, as the eulogizer for my father, Charles, and as pallbearer once more for his mother, Arilla Hobbs, who died in Miami less than two months after we buried Dad in Tallahassee during the year 2000. 

Now, at age 52, it seems that hardly a week goes by without someone that I grew up with—or their parents (or children)—having transitioned from this Earthly life. On a lighter note about this heavy topic, last year, I ran into a childhood friend of mine, Tawanda Carter Odom, at a Kappa Alpha Psi Probate show and she made me burst out in laughter when she told me that she had just told her husband that she doesn't believe that someone that she grew up with has died "until I see a 'Rest in Peace' post on Chuckie Hobbs's Facebook page."

Photo with Tawanda Carter Odom at the Kappa Probate in March 2023

While the levity was noted, as we all know, death is no laughing matter—and it is coming for ALL of us in time. 

Now I, like most of my friends of the Christian faith, when asked about death and dying will fire off the same response that we learned as children in Sunday School, which is: "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord." But when I talk on a deeper level with my friends, it is clear that no matter how "tangled up and tied up in Jesus" we believe ourselves to be, most folks that I know are nowhere near ready to die and go be with Jesus—for myriad reasons. 

To that point, earlier this morning, I read a review of the book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, one written by Bronnie Ware, a former Hospice palliative care worker, from 2011. After decades of providing end of life care for the terminally ill, Ware notes the following five general "regrets:" 

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

• I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

• I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

• I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Ware adds, "When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.”

Profound...

Now, the purpose of today's Hobbservation Point blog is not to be a downer, but to pose Ware's "Five Regrets" as a challenge to us, the living, in the here and now! Consider for a moment if you knew the precise date of your final breath, what choices would you make to enjoy your final years, months, and days on Earth?

To keep it real, I have found myself pondering several of Ware's five regrets MANY times since the pandemic turned our world upside down back in 2020. Especially regret #1, "a life true to myself and not what others expected," as I can trace a path back to at least sixth grade when many decisions that I made, from middle school on forward, were heavily influenced by my parents and peer group. Not that those decisions were all bad; most, actually, turned out for the good! But there are other decisions, plenty of others, where I realize now that "two roads diverged in the yellow wood," like the great Robert Frost once wrote, and the road that I CHOSE to take led to stress, depression, and at times, utter failure and misery. 

But instead of focusing on the occasional bad choice or poor outcome in the past, I now pray about each and every present day decision in a way that will lead me back to one of my long deceased father's favorite Shakespearean quotes from Hamlet, which is"to thine own self, be true."

I challenge each of my readers to do the same... 😊