99 Stories of God

35. Just a Rumor

An artist who had just won an award and was enjoying a nice midlife bump in her career was rumored to have died. The rumor did not, as they say, spread like wildfire, for she was not well known.

This minor incident affected her deeply and negatively, however. Her work suffered. She became obsessed with how her so-called friends reacted to this rumor of death. Did they cry? No one it seems had cried. But that was because, these so-called friends assured her, they did not believe she had died. There hadn’t been time to cry because the rumor was disproven so quickly. They’d been shocked, of course. Did they set right to summarizing her life and work with superlatives? Again, the answers provided were less than comforting. What did they really think of her anyway? If they couldn’t even tell her what they thought when they’d heard she died?

A so-called friend quoted from the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, this from a small red book he had recently discovered among what remained of his father’s things.

Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and the rememberer and the remembered: and all this in a nook of this part of the world.

The little red book had been a gift from this fellow’s mother to his father, both dead many years now, with no hope of coming back, and here she was, the artist, who had come back as it were and why wasn’t she more grateful about it or at least see the humor in it but she did not.