Returning Son

          You never really know that death is a teacher until you see it face to face. You never truly appreciate the preciousness of life until the teacher shows you the ugly permanence of death. Life lets you change. It lets your skin change, your hair change, your eyes, and your mind. It is being able to feel that change that is life. It is going through life’s processes—growing, maturing, thinking, and loving—that allows life to explode before us. It explodes with feeling and change. It is feeling the growth of a family. It is feeling even pain, like the pain of being court-martialed by the very military service you love so dearly. It is learning to suffer the insults of boot camp. It is falling in love and feeling so completely immersed in that love only to have to live with the loneliness of a forced separation from your lover. Life is the entire gamut of human emotions. It is all of the processes. It is both winning and losing; it is pain and pleasure. It is even just barely making it.

          Death is no change forever. It is no feeling ever. It is never finishing the family you were well on your way to creating. It is never seeing the baby your wife was pregnant with when you went to Kuwait to prepare for war and your eventual death. Death is all of the potential for change and feeling built up inside the shell of a man or woman and never released because it is stopped instead by another kind of shell. When death explodes before us, it is always for the last time.  Sean Cassedy learned about death from two great teachers. The first one spoke from a makeshift podium in nature. The second one lectured him from the battlefield.

          When he was younger, when he was a small boy, Sean Cassedy learned about death the same way most people do. Someone in the family died. Someone close to him. He would go to the funeral. He stood a few feet away from a well-preserved, well-dressed body. The body lay in a nice casket adorned with bouquets of flowers. The casket was in a clean room filled with the odor of the funeral flowers, and soft, doleful music played quietly. It was this way when his grandfather died. He also learned about death through life on the farm. From a very young age he knew how to shoot. Sean’s father taught him how to hunt.

          By the time he went off to war in Iraq, Sean was both an accomplished farmer and hunter. He knew how to prepare the game he killed. He could skin an animal and do what was necessary to convert its carcass into something fit for the family meal. He also learned about death when the family slaughtered farm animals as part of growing up in Bagdad, Kentucky. Sean was a sensitive child. When he discovered a bird that was injured, he cared for it. The bird was out of the competitive cycle. Its wound had made it easy prey to both its natural enemies and the natural elements. But with Sean’s help it remained immune from attack until the injury healed and Sean released it. Back to nature. Back to its own war front.

          When he was a teenager, Sean liked to play online video games—so-called massive, multiplayer, online, role-playing games, or MMORPG for short. Sean formed a team with his two younger brothers, Joshua and Stephen, and played a game where thousands of other players who subscribed for server time played both with the Cassedy team and against them. But the death he learned here was something called virtual death. The characters killed in the medieval world of this game did not die a permanent death. To provide an incentive for subscribers to die but come back, and to keep paying their monthly subscription, the rules of the game permitted reinstatement with blue crystals known as lifestones.