Aw, death.  It comes for thee, blah blah blah. Articles, movies, songs, pole dancers*, all die, so why we talking** about it, again? Haven’t we beat this subject to…death. Hm.

            There are deaths that seem natural and even poetic, almost hard to grieve over. The 84-year-old husband who dies days after his wife. The young, inspirational woman who loses a valiant, public battle with her cancer to raise awareness for the disease. The man who lay on top of his kids at a school shooting to save the kids’ lives.

Most of us, however, will die a normal, semi-private, wish-we-had-more-time death, hopefully with loved ones near, if not right there, at the moment it happens. Maybe we will have advanced notice or maybe we won’t. Meh, that’s life. Death, death. Or more accurately, that is life and death, or…let’s move on.

There are also the “surprising” deaths, like your favorite sports star dying in a plane crash. Or your co-worker dying in a car crash. Both lead to this statement: “I just saw (fill in any name) yesterday”, often with the added “(Name) looked great.”

As interesting as the many different ways death presents itself is, rather than list them all, we’ll talk about the one just learned today. It’s a situation probably only experienced by seniors, but you decide.

Bob Weir died. Anything? He mean anything to you? No? He didn’t to me, either…at first. I passed over the headline and moved on to more interesting and personal stuff in the news this morning. There was also breakfast, opening the blinds, bathroom duty, other tasks, and Bob Weir. To shorten a long story, it took about an hour for Bob Weir to work his way through the detritus of hoarded memory, shake off the dust, and explode into the front of my brain. I was never a Grateful Dead (Ironic?) Head. (You do know the Grateful Dead, right? If not, I’ll continue, anyway, and not mention the “g” word.) it was hard to be a living person in the 60 and 70s, though, and not know some of their songs and at least 3,438 of their rabid fans., The Dead Heads. My lack of even partial commitment to the rabid fandom was probably because The Grateful Dead’s best work was done live, in concerts…crowds that cost money. I hated crowds and hated spending money to be in them.

In 1972, The Dead cunningly put out a triple record live album, recorded in Europe. So, an American band defies current marketing rigor and puts out a THREE RECORD album of almost their entire Spring concert work in Europe. No hit singles. No influencers chirping about it. No late-night talk show publicity. Just BANG, here’s a three-record set of our best work. Deal with it. It was in 1973, in Mike’s parents’ attic, with speakers up to the eaves, no adults home, a dime bag on the coffee table, and four quarts of Boones Farm wine, when I finally learned the reason for the Dead Head Fan Club. And it happened with no crowd, no entry fee, since Mike bought both the album and “refreshments”, and no “Turn that shite down!” scream from the ground floor. It was heaven on earth. 

It didn’t make me turn all gooey or anything, and it never led to my purchase of anything the Dead did, but the music, the musicianship, and the time was extraordinary. And I learned band members names. We did the same show nearly every night for a month, until my friend’s parents came home and then…life. No more Dead for me. I never listened to any of those three records again. I married several times, had kids, never turned the volume of anything up over halfway, and got on with life, allowing the Month of The Dead to deposit itself into a long-term memory folder to be filed away alphabetically, presumably.

Until Bob Weir died.

Some long-term memories we don’t remember until a really, really hard jabbing*** with something pointy. Like death.

The Month of The Dead in 1973, is hereby officially remembered, recognized and celebrated as A Special Time in A Good Life, and is added to my google calendar so it won’t be forgotten, again. Thank you for dying Grateful Dead guitarist and founder, Bob Weir. We hardly knew you but will never forget you.

Amen.

            *Just checking to see if you’re actually reading.

            **Ai grammar police say this should be: “why ARE we talking”. Feck them.

            ***Ai: “make this wording more concise.” Me: Devour feculence, Ai.