Momento Mori Alex Bilotti Life Isn't Fair

I have indicated in earlier blogs that the first moral statement that we make is “It’s not fair.” That statement follows through life like our shadow which is with us every time the sun and good times are in front of us. The sunlight is what gives rise to the shadow which follows as hardship to create the dark times, if you will, in our lives. Light is necessary and welcomed to see the darkness of tragedy that journeys with us.

Anger is based in a failed expectation. We expect one thing and get another. Think about the last time you were angry, and I think that you will see that somewhere in that anger is a failed or desired expectation that was not met. We find ourselves harkening back to that first moral statement and say, “It’s not fair!” It can be a small expectation such as going to a restaurant and not getting the quality of the meal that we expected. It can be big like expecting someone we love to live after a treatment for their illness, and they die because the treatment failed to meet our expectation of cure.

I think that the way to a fuller life is to keep the possibility of bad news or failed expectation closer in our heart for in the words of Rabbi Kushner, “Tragedy doesn’t have a ticket into our lives. It has a box seat.” We need to remind ourselves that we are mortal and each day is not a given but a gift. It is a matter of perspective. This doesn’t mean that we live life with less joy. It means that we have our expectations reset to be ready when tragedy comes. We live from a deeper spot.

One person who embodied this to me is a former student of mine, Alex Bilotti. I have attached the video of her address to the EA Upper School Community when she was a senior. Watch it and you will find an ingredient to living life to the fullest. I was Alex’s faculty advisor. I set up our advisory program at EA so that the students could choose their advisor. I was fortunate that she chose me after teaching her in ethics class. In her chapel address, she used the phrase in Latin, Momento mori, Remember your mortality. I re-watch her address when long shadows fall behind me as a meditation to “restart” what she taught me.

Ernest Becker, author of the Denial of Death, said it another way that “we live life the way we view death.” I wear an orange rubber wristband as Alex’s classmates did with the inscription, A.V.B COURAGE. The address she gave in chapel won the Class of 1890 Religion Prize at graduation for the best essay, and there is a picture of me giving her the award with a big hug in my office. I have a lantern made of clay with a candle inside on my office shelf that she made in a sculpture class her senior year. It is inscribed: “Dear Rev, when you light this think of me. (a heart) Alex.” She died while she was a student at Penn. Her parents decided that the Mass of Christian Burial would be at her Roman Catholic Church in the city. Alex was small in stature and huge in heart. She was all of five feet tall. Her friends called her Big Al. Her life was a testament to what she wrote in her address to our community. I was the preacher at her Mass of Christian Burial in the city and brought the lighted lantern that she made into the pulpit with me. Before the service, her father asked me if I knew how many would be there. He didn’t know the impact Alex had on others. A thousand people were present. Some were present just because they had heard about her.

Word travels fast at EA and in South Philly. Her parents told me when I called them the week after the service that lot of people told them that they went out to buy lanterns to light to remember her. The lantern she made had a design through which the light could shine. I likened it to that pattern of pain that made up a good part of her life, but it couldn’t stop Alex’s love for life and for others from shining through.

Alex is on my mind today because I passed the cemetery yesterday where she is interred coming back from the service for another person who died ahead of expected time.

I think there is a metaphor here from the world of boxing as well. Throughout a fight the boxers exchange body blows with their opponent. People not familiar with the sport don’t see them as important as they are looking for the knockout punch and don’t pay attention to the blows to the body. But those blows are experienced throughout the fight, and they wear out the opponent, but courage can take over as it did with Alex. That is what life is like. Certainly, Alex knew that. Momento mori, Remember your mortality!  It keeps that realization with us that “life is not fair,” our first and perhaps last moral statement.

Watch for the head fake about the meditation above that you may not have seen coming. Alex’s words are very important, if not essential, to consider this Memorial Day Weekend as they embody the lives of our soldiers who died on battlefields with courage and those who are left behind with the memory of loved ones who have gone on to God’s greater glory. “No greater love has a person than to lay down their life for their friends.” (John 15:13)

America The Beautiful

Alex Bilotti Chapel Address