A long time ago. So long ago, that I cannot remember exact details, I watched a comedy skit for a clean up service that stayed in my mind. It percolated. It might have been a Saturday Night Live skit. It was selling a service for when you die. They, as the skit went, would come and sanitize your house when you died. They would get rid of the bongs, magazines, and clothes laying around on the floor. They would spruce up and clean up your image post death. Don’t know why, but I occasionally have thought of that skit throughout the years. One time, it came to mind after a weekend Los Angeles morning anchor died in a somewhat unseemly manner anithetical to the image he portrayed weekend after weekend. If you lived in Los Angeles in 2018, you may know what I am referring to. I don’t wish to continue on this track of thinking. I have much digressed as I wanted to use this more as a set up to something positive.

Here we go.

Today the skit came to mind. But for a totally different reason. Today the comedian Gilbert Gottfried died. He had that shrill voice and very crude sense of humor. It wasn’t for everyone. But in all fairness comedy skits are considered dicey propositions these days. I give kudos to many who dare go on a stage and try to make people laugh. The comedian died from complications due to a long-term illness. In reading his biography bits, I came to realize he voiced the duck in the Aflac commercials. Everyone I know, knows Aflac. It’s a memorable commercial. And I had no idea who had been the voice of entertainment. I nodded in respect upon reading that and wishing him to rest in peace.

But it got me thinking of all the good things we don’t know about people’s private lives. Often we never learn of them. Sometimes we find out at a memorial or a biography released upon a death announcement. How sad for us as a collective. Our lives we be so much more enriched if we knew these good things and could celebrate them while the individual was still with us.

I’ll quietly leave this piece here.