She was special. She was my aunt and my namesake. When my parents died many years ago, Aunt Tera was there, encouraging me to stay in school, not to alter a young life course. She talked. I listened. She lived a life by example. I watched. And I paid attention.

It’s been five years since she died. Her legacy is simple. Tera Jean Patricks, my Aunt Tera, will be remembered by many whose lives she touched, some whose lives she helped nurture, and some she helped guide when they needed a direction.

Today, her name, my namesake, is born again.

I’m Tera Thomas O’Brien, Aunt Tera’s niece. I’ve asked Tera’s friends, Alexis Kayhill, Bambi Brannan, and Ron McElfresh, and they have agreed to allow me to become curator and editor for Tera Talks.

My objective is two fold.

First, I want to carry forward Aunt Tera’s legacy, her flame of life. To that end I plan to publish entries from her personal journal. Tera had a unique way of looking at life; all the grandeur of humanity. And the foibles of mankind.

Second, as Aunt Tera’s namesake, I feel a personal obligation, and I have a desire, to express my view of life; to carry a flame, to light up the day, and bring thought, comfort, and stimulation to all I see, and to do so in a way that would make my aunt proud.

I may not possess Aunt Tera’s technical abilities (she bought me my first computer, a Mac), knowledge, and life experience, but I admired her willingness to share a perspective in an amusing, thoughtful, and sometimes irreverent way.

And so, Tera Talks begins anew.

You won’t believe what people say when it’s time to say no more. I’m tired. Sometimes I sleep for days at a time and can’t remember much of anything. Other times I lie awake, seemingly for days on end, and remember everything.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about last words. There’ve been some good ones down through the ages. I don’t expect mine, whatever it may be, to be carried into the history books.

Still, I’m thinking about last words and looking for some inspiration. Help me out.

If memory serves me appropriately, it was George Bernard Shaw who said, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” Maybe that’s why there are so many CSI shows on TV and so few situation comedies worth watching.

Dylan Thomas supposedly said, “I just had eighteen straight scotches. I think that’s the record…After thirty-nine years, this is all I’ve done.”

Of course, his view of his own talent may have been distorted by the scotch, and certainly so on more than one occasion.

It was pop singer Sam Cooke who reportedly said, “Lady, you shot me!” It isn’t often that crime, judge, jury and executioner all show up at once. Still, Sam summed up the situation quite well.

US President Ulysses S. Grant, considered by some to be a brilliant general of the civil war, by most others merely a well-known alcoholic has, as his last recorded words, “Water!”

That seems oddly appropriate.

“Don’t worry, it’s not loaded…” were the last words of Terry Kath of Chicago Transit Authority. He was cleaning a gun without a magazine and pulled the trigger. There was still one bullet in the chamber.

Famous last words are different than an epitaph on a head stone. “I told you I was sick!’ has always been a favorite.

I haven’t decided whether I should do my personal “famous last words” and then just shut up until it’s over, or merely leave an epitaph buried somewhere in my will. Or both.

Modern medicine being what it is I may have to remain silent for much longer than I ever have in the past, though much to the relief of a few and former friends.

There’s another kind of Famous Last Words—those words uttered or written which turn out to be ever so wrong, and very shortsighted.

One of the Warner brothers of the film studio Warner Brothers, reportedly uttered, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”

Never say never.

Irving Fisher, a professor of economics at Yale reportedly said, “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” That was in 1929 just before the stock market crash.

Never say never.

Maybe that’s what I should say.

NOTE:
I talked briedly with Tera on the phone today and transcribed the above so readers would know she’s still around, still thinking; though she sleeps a lot these days.
—Alexis Kayhill

What happens to us when we die? My guess is that we die. To a dying person, not having to wait around just to watch a favorite TV show is one of the benefits of TiVo.

I found House this spring and summer via my TiVo, Fox, and endless re-runs. House is an irritating, irritable, though brilliant diagnostician—a fictional TV doctor so nasty and sarcastic we’d all like to have him working on our case.

I found Dead Like Me the same way. TiVo and a couple of dozen re-runs.

It’s been a challenge trying to figure out why I missed the first run of both TV series, but I did. Thanks to TiVo and re-runs I can catch up on cool characters just before my own character passes on into oblivion. Or, becomes a tick or tapeworm or perhaps a beagle.

In Dead Like Me, the main character, Georgia Lass, is a pouty, self-absorbed 18-year-old who’s life is ended by a toilet seat which fell from the Soviet-era Mir space station.

George, as co-star Mandy Patinkin calls her, is narrator and protagonist, and becomes a “grim reaper” when she dies. Grim reapers are the un-dead, they don’t go to heaven, they don’t wait in some kind of purgatory, and they don’t even go to hell.

Grim reapers stay on earth and take the souls of others who die or are scheduled to die and help them on their journey to the afterlife, whatever that may be.

Interestingly, Dead Like Me was more about how the living deal with each other than how the dead deal with death.

Dealing with death after the fact can’t be all that hard, can it?. It’s a done deal already. Dealing with death before the fact is something else again.

All this TiVo-ready hospital, sickness, dying, dead people roles got me to thinking. What happens to us when we die?

It’s either nothing, or something else.

Since there’s little evidence to the contrary, I’m going with nothing, though there’s plenty of argumenation for something else.

There’s just little agreement, lots of argumentation, and not much fact, and less evidence—other than we don’t hear much from the dead.

So, what happens to us when we die?

Most of the evidence points to the James Tiberius Kirk response, “We cease to exist.” That means we don’t exist as who we were, and probably don’t exist as anything else, either.

As I said, there’s plenty of room for argumentation here, starting with the age old question, “Why do we die?” It’s probably too late in my personal product life cycle to get started on that one, so I won’t.

Judeo-Christian dogma of a special afterlife, specifically heaven, is also too nebulous for me, faith notwithstanding. Maybe your view is different, but somehow I doubt that a terrorist who blows up an airplane or everyone on a crowded bus will receive 72 virgins in heaven.

Is that even put in writing anywhere? See what faith can do?

Death? Death is the Big Sleep™, the Final Nap, the end result of all those things you did, all those things you wished you’d done but never did, and life’s change event.

Change? Yes, but change to what? Where? Why?

If I could, if I can, I’ll let you know.

The chips in life fall, but not always to the swift or the wise. What makes a good life? Family? Food? Fun? People? Power? An education and career? Good health? All of the above?

Then what makes an average life? Or, a life that’s fraught with pain and sorrow?

For most of us, there are good moments in a lifetime, and some moments we’d like to rewrite if we could. I have my list.

Looking back, for me, as it probably is for most of us, life has been a mixture of good and bad moments, and many that are somewhere in-between.

Arguably, a life is made up of many choices and circumstances and consequences, and those thousand little sins.

Sins. Numerous instances of daily life where we didn’t do what we should have when we could have.

For most of us, the sins of life are small; over time, they add up. An extra helping of dinner, a few extra pounds, a little less exercise.

A thousand little sins can bring us, later in life, the pain of attempting to return to good health following years of slowly avoiding the steps necessary to maintain health in the first place.

Or not. I’ve learned it just doesn’t always work that way.

A thousand little sins may kill you, perhaps on the third or fourth sin, or number 893.

Or not.

Circumstances befall us all, at some time or another. Winning a multi-million dollar lottery is a circumstance with consequences, perhaps the end result of a few sins; wasting money on a legitimized and sanctioned game with odds worse than Las Vegas.

For most, there’s a little less money in the pocket, but the dream carries on for another day.

Generally speaking, I can recognize some circumstances and consequences which may have been the result of one or more of my thousand little sins in life.

I once promised to call and talk to a friend who’d been ill. Before I knew it, the call was never made, and my friend had died unexpectedly.

For me, the consequence was living with some guilt that could have been avoided, and at times thinking that perhaps my own health problems were possibly the result of one or two of a thousand little sins.

That sounds too much like self made guilt in a circumstantial world, doesn’t it? I thought so.

Here’s a sentence my high school English teacher would love; red grading pencil tightly grasped in her wrinkled hand, a gleam in her eye as she counts the grade points I’ll suffer for creating such a monstrous creature disguised as a phrase:

We never always do everything we should do all the time.

In some convoluted way, though I’m not proud of it, and I’m sure I can do better, perhaps more succinct—that butchered phrase makes perfect sense to me; at a time when not much about life on earth makes much sense at all.

I can still hear her exasperated, scolding, tight-lipped admonition as the red marks flew, “Get to the point, Tera.”

Assume for a moment that King Solomon of the Bible was one of the wisest men ever to walk the earth. At Ecclesiastes 9:11, he wrote:

“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Wisdom of the ages couched in phrases from generations long ago, in a book seldom read and less respected by the masses. How can that wise thought be summed up in today’s language?

Consider George Orwell’s take:

“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

A sin of over communicating the obvious?

In the final analysis of billions of lives through the ages, and the personal lists of thousands of sins committed, knowingly and unknown to and by all of us, remember what Tera Jean Patricks said about life on planet earth:

“Shit happens.”

Deal with it. Get over it. Tomorrow never comes if you live your life to the full today.

How much do we really know about death? Knowing that we’re going to die, sooner or later, doesn’t bother most of us. That is, until we get much closer to death. Then we start thinking about it.

Life is somewhat unique for humans. We can reflect on our lives, past, present, and future.

It’s doubtful that other creatures on the Earth do such thinking, though I could be wrong. I could also be wrong about death.

There’s just so much about it that we don’t know. We presume to know, often based upon religious background.

Still, there’s not much feedback from those who’ve died already, is there?

Life for many is a struggle, a wretched existence of day to day effort, often just to get to the next day.

For the privileged few, life has many moments of pleasure, though I dare separate pleasure and happiness.

They’re not the same.

There’s a large park and a school near my parent’s home here in Los Angeles. Everyday that I visit there are children playing.

From their sounds one would presume an aura of happiness and pleasure exists in such a gathering of innocent creatures.

Children, as with aging adults and most everyone in between, don’t give much though to death, dying, or the process of living.

Most of us just live out our days, drawing what comfort we can from others, extending ourselves to some, enjoying what we can.

We know full well that it will all end but don’t give it much consideration. Doing so would put a kink in the day, I’m sure.

Now I know. Though I don’t know the number, my days are numbered.

All the joys and pleasures and happy moments of the past remain as memories, some vivid, some peacefully co-existing with a strange curiosity about what may come after tomorrow.

I’m not one who buys the “angels in heaven” routine for those who pass on. There’s not much purpose in that scenario.

Yet, what bothers me most about life, life as we know it in a normal, pleasant existence, is the struggle and the inevitability of the result.

Death is obviously a natural occurrence and part of what we call life. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

There’s hatred, injustice, catastrophe, and injury in life. We seem to survive those days and continue the hope and the struggle.

Death is that part of life that I’ve come to hate the most.

Editor’s Note: I apologize for the delay between journal entries. Before her death, Tera passed along her personal journal. It is filled with hundreds of comments, essays, observations, and perspectives on every subject matter. As time permits, I will edit and publish select journal entries for Tera Talks. —Alexis Kayhill

Life is a little more like Las Vegas than you might think. Either way it’s a gamble. Numbers are interesting. They’re precise, not difficult to remember the order, and seem to find their way into everything. Life is a numbers game.

Numbers. Like gambling in Las Vegas. Or, insurance, extended warranties, and exercise club memberships.

Las Vegas’ success is made up of numbers. The house has to win enough to stay in business.

The player (you) has to win enough to want to try again, not enough to leave and not come back.

Insurance is a numbers game. Insurance companies are betting a certain amount that, in the case of life insurance, that you’ll live long enough not to collect on your insurance policy.

Multiply those numbers a few millions times, spread the potential losses over many states or countries, and the insurance company reduces risk and makes money.

If everyone died at the same time there’d be hell to pay in the insurance industry.

The exercise club down the street is pretty much the same. It’s a number’s game.

The club sells memberships to use the clubs exercise equipment and facilities for a month or a year. The amount is modest, perhaps $40 or $75 a month (I‘m guessing, so bear with me).

In their world of numbers if everone with a membership showed up at the door to exercise each day, they’d be overrun and close down or turn away hundreds or thousands of angry members.

In other words, they don’t want you to exercise. They just want you to pay the money each month.

Life is full of numbers games.

For example, if you eat right, live modestly, reduce stress, floss and brush your teeth, exercise regularly, get your shots, and so on, you’re likely to live longer than those who don’t.

Likely, yes. Guaranteed, no.

There’s nothing to prevent all the members of an exercise club from showing up at the door at the same time. Chaos would rule, right?

So, why don’t the numbers fall that way?

There’s nothing to prevent all the State Farm car insurance policy holders in the state of Illinois from getting into an accident on the same day. But it won’t happen.

Why don’t the numbers fall that way? Is there a law for big numbers? Do statisticians know something and they’re not telling those of use who pay insurance premiums and exercise club membership dues?

If we live a life of various numbers games, where we sometimes win and sometimes lose, so be it with the numbers game itself.

There are certain laws the numbers have to follow, just like laws of physics which dictate bread will fall jelly side down in accord with the expense of the carpet it falls on.

I’ve always flossed, always eaten well, and exercised regularly. I drive the speed limit, and except for a relationship here and there, never did much that could be construed as stressful.

The numbers say my days are numbered. Life might be a numbers game for all of us. So is death.

I just don’t agree with the numbers.

Editor’s Note: Before her death, Tera passed along her personal journal. It is filled with hundreds of comments, essays, observations, and perspectives on every subject matter. As time permits, I will edit and publish select journal entries for Tera Talks—Alexis Kayhill