Company Blog

Thoughts On Mortality

by Adam Zack — May 7, 2025

“If you’re telling your appreciation, your love and your gratitude to a casket,
it really doesn’t help you, and especially not the guy in the casket. “

Once a year we have a small family gathering at my Uncle Paul’s in Long Beach for brunch and mimosas. It’s a mini reunion, with my daughters, their spouses, my brother John and his wife Uncle Paul and Aunt Mary. It’s a relaxed, fun and very comfortable time. This year Paul said something that got me thinking. In a somewhat whimsical, and somewhat resigned way, he said that we were the only family he had left and how much it meant that we all traveled to see him. The more I thought about it, the more I had a feeling that he was in reckoning with his mortality and the fact that these annual gatherings would not be going on forever.

My uncle is 84 and I have two (yes two) dads in their mid 80’s. I had not thought of them in terms of their inevitable exit from this earth sooner rather than later. It weighed heavily on my mind, so I decided to contact a close friend and mentor who is also an octogenarian, albeit much more agile than my uncle. I know I can always be honest with him, and he will never hesitate to tell me when I am irrational or full of crap. I asked him if he had thought about his mortality, and he kind of laughed, and said “of course.” Our discussion evolved into what he had written to be read at his memorial service and to say now what we may hold inside to those we love that one day soon will be too late to say. If you’re telling your appreciation, your love and your gratitude to a casket, it really doesn’t help you, and especially not the guy in the casket. So, I listened, I absorbed, I contemplated. Then I did something. I took off from work early and went to see my two dads. I told them (separately, our family is weird, but not that weird) how much I appreciated what they have done to make me the man I am today. I told them the strengths they had that I valued and learned from. And then I told them that I loved them. So, any words that I one day have to say to a closed casket will be reinforcements, not revelations.