I read the obituaries today. It's something I rarely do, but today I read the obituaries. There were two that stuck out at me. The first one was of the inventor of a type of cake pan, dead at 82. The obituary went on and on about the success of the cake pan-eventually there were over a million sold. Nothing about the dead man's personality, character or life were included in the obituary aside from the story of the cake pan he invented. The line that summed up his life was "Inventor of cake pan." The most important thing he accomplished in 82 years of life was inventing a cake pan.
I also read the obituary of a 19 year old Marine. He had worked through high school, then joined the marines when he graduated. He proposed to his future wife while stationed overseas so he could marry her when he returned on leave. He came back and they married over Valentine's Day week. He surprised her with candy and a teddy bear when they arrived at their honeymooning place. They had one year together until he was stationed overseas again. While in Iraq, a suicide car bomber attempted to ram a car full of explosives into a barracks full of Marines. The 19 year old, rather than diving for cover, stood his ground and poured fire into the car, forcing the driver to detonate it far short of his target. The Marine was killed from the shrapnel but his comrades in the barracks were saved. I really don't know which one was sadder. That one man had 82 years on this earth and used them to invent a cake pan, or that another had only 19 years to live and one year to cherish his wife. Both obituaries showed a life completely wasted-one person had a life and pissed it away on a cake pan and one never really got a chance to live before he sacrificed it for his comrades.





Man, the one line that just sucker punched me when I read it was the one about the Marine surprising his wife with the candy and teddy bear. It's just got naïve childlike love written all over it-there's no great romance or suave moves being put on here-it's just a man barely past childhood who is so excited about the girl he loves that he buys her a teddy bear and candy just to make her feel special. The whole obituary read like an inspirational feel-good success story, in fact-the guy works through high school to support his brother with Down's syndrome, then he joins the Marines to pay for college. He proposes to his sweetheart and marries her over Valentine's. Aside from the fact that you know he's going to die at 19 ripped to pieces by shrapnel, it really does sound like the sort of All-American success story that we all love-he gets the girl, he'll go through college, get a nice job, big house, 2.5 children and a white picket fence. He was on the fast track towards realizing the American dream before he decided to sacrifice that to save the lives of his buddies inside the barracks.



It sort of makes you wonder if the American dream is really something worth striving for, after all. I mean, the cake pan maker served in the navy during world war 2. He married the girl he loved and they spent the rest of his life together. The funny thing is, though, that the only real mention his wife gets in the obituary is that she wrote a book of 300 cake recipes that could be used with his pan in order to drum up sales. There's no acts of spontaneous love or even mention of them spending time together. They just poured their lives into this cake pan because it was selling massive amounts and making them lots of money, which they could use to buy stuff, which they could use to achieve happiness. At the end of 82 years following the American dream, the cake pan inventor's life was summed up with the title "Inventor of cake pan dies at 82." All he accomplished that will live on after him is a cake pan. I mean, sure, he probably laughed and loved and danced and drank and make friends and enemies, but ten years after he's gone, will anything in his life have mattered aside from the cake pan that he invented? The Marine died after 19 years. He had 19 years, and he used them to do more that will endure than the cake pan maker did in 82 years in service to a cake pan he invented.



We've got a finite time on this earth. We're supposed to use that time to build things that will last for an infinite amount of time. We can try to gather up as much stuff as we can and try to hold on to it for as long as we can, or we just can stop trying to hold on to the dust of the earth and start building where moths and rust don't destroy and thieves don't steal.