"Oh bloody hell", as Ricky Gervais would say. It's that time of year again. Another August 18th post about Ryan and what would have been this year his 28th birthday. I don't know if it was by chance or fate that I picked to re-watch Afterlife, the three season show on Netflix, the last few nights. Well I finished it up last night. I won't blow it and offer up a spoiler alert but the image below is from the last scene from the last episode.
I will offer this up. The story is about marriage, death, grief, and suicide. There's a bunch of other stuff as well but that's what jumped out at me. I will say this, the ending is kind of like the ending in the Sopranos, when we are left to wonder if Tony get's whacked at Holsten's Diner in Bloomfield. That's all I'll say, watch it it's good.
They say parents should never bury their children, but we do. They say "I could never go on", but you do. Now the normal order, while still painful, should be the older folks in our family age out and pass away, hopefully in order from oldest on down. But that's not reality. We're animals. Just like any other. Big deer get hit by cars as well as the little ones we see on the side of the road. We've all seen them. Congenital anomaly's, disease, trauma, or just shutting down we're all gonna get bit by something in the end. But I'll say this, burying your kid sucks, but life does go on.
When I think of Ryan, which honestly, is not everyday, it either fills me with happiness or sadness. Watching Afterlife set me up perfect for a nice little pity party for a minute. What usually gets me are the thoughts of where he would be today at 28 years old. I get reminded of that when I see friends of his or the children of my friends adulting and doing things like settling into careers, buying houses, getting married, or starting a family. He would have been 28 and, since he chose to check out at age 21, that's seven years of unknowns that I'm left to ponder when I'm pondering.
So I sat there last night watching the credits roll, the dogs sitting at my feet wondering if I had any scraps of food I would throw at them, and Theresa and Lauren packing for a trip today to the North Country for a college drop off, what would happen if I Googled his name? What would show up?
There are other Ryan Archers out there. The one that got me was, well Ryan Archer, over at Princeton University. My Ryan was a genius. A mind that was a like a computer when it
came to math and physics. What's funny is in classes like, Partial Differential Equations, he would get an A while in the college starter classes he would just get by with a C. If it didn't challenge the deepest part of his parietal lobes of his brain he didn't care. So he could have been that Ryan above, and that kills me. And there are a bunch of other Ryan Archers, as seen below, that popped up during my Ryan Archer search. Each of them with their
own story and accomplishments. And then there was my Ryan Archer. Famous in his own right for, well, passing on. I guess for the rest of eternity a Google search will have him pop up,
and if one cared, they could read a little about him. Well, really, obits only tell a polished up snapshot of ones life, in his case a relatively short one. And that added to my self loathing pity party. With all that Ryan meant to his family and friends this is what is left? That got me angry, well, just kinda down. All of the memories, the photos, and the things I hold onto, the only thing the world can see is his obit? Oh well, that's life, or death.
But then something caught my eye about my Ryan. I think the day of Ryan's death his Mom and I came together and wanted to do something in his memory. Now, while kinda macabre, when someone dies and you want to do something you have to strike while the iron's hot. We decided that we wanted to do a scholarship in his name so we contacted Rowan University and soon after the Ryan Archer Scholarship was started.
The way it was explained to us was this. You can raise money and it would go into the general scholarship fund at Rowan or, if you raised $25,000 a scholarship in his name would be created for in perpetuity, which means forever. And that's what came up when I Googled Ryan Archer last night.
