The Dotted Logline

Tonight I read a good portion of Douglas Adams’ The Salmon Of Doubt on the plane ride back from my grandfather’s funeral. It is an interesting book, full of snippets of writing that give some nice snapshots of Adams as a person. It’s a small thing (can a mass market paperback really sum up the entirety of a human life? Can a eulogy?), but it is some comfort

Now, I’m a Christian girl with some fairly set beliefs about death, but the loss of the experiences and dreams, the real story of a person’s life that only they knew, has always struck me as utterly tragic. I don’t believe that a person’s existence really disappears, but it can be hard to think outside of the realm of human experience and people are quite apt at forgetting. Actually, it seems like people are quite apt at not listening, or at least asking, in the first place. Which is why I unfortunately know more stories about the life of Douglas Adams at the moment than I do about Alton Houser. Sometimes we realize too late that people’s lives aren’t something we can pick up and study at our convenience, like a paperback book.