Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati

While going through some boxes of old photographs, I recently came across the following snapshot.  It struck me, because I am the only remaining person alive in the picture.  Even the person who took the photo has passed.  And so it can happen that, sometimes, while stumbling through old photographs, the brevity of life confronts us.

That’s the Grand Canyon behind us—perhaps the perfect backdrop for reflections about the shortness of human life as compared to the slow flow of time on Earth, or the slow flow of the Colorado river cutting that canyon through Arizona rock.

It is expected that my grandparents would no longer be here.  But obviously, my aunt and two cousins (as well as my uncle, the photographer, and another cousin not yet born at the time of our trip to the Grand Canyon) passed in the prime of their family’s life due to an accident.  So it is with a weird sense of fatality that I gaze upon this picture now, realizing that of this small collection of people photographed all those years ago, I am the last man still standing on this Earth.

How many other photographs of people passed sit forgotten (or remembered) in shoeboxes or dusty family albums all across this small planet?  To know those who have died is utterly unremarkable.  And to think about one’s own death is even more unremarkable.  But that knowledge of my own global insignificance, as well as my similarities to so many who have gone before, or who live now—that still does not curb the reflective introspection that comes with meditating on death, and the fragility of this quick life on Earth.

Thank you for reading (and printing from) The Cincinnati Beacon.