So I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately.

Not any more than usual, though, really. When you think about it, death is really around us all the time, especially during the season of winter. Everything is dying and gray– if there’s a time to think about death, this is it.

While I was on the bus this morning, I was looking out the window, and, as buildings were passing in front of my field of view, we went past an empty lot and my view spread out to the building over in the next block. There were like three or four rows of windows, and the bottom left corner window was open. (It might have been a deck area– we were just driving by and I only got a quick look) But there was a man standing in this open window. The room behind him was dark, and he was dressed in some sort of hooded cloak thing, with his face completely hooded and dark. It looked like the hoodie Bruce Willis wore while saving people in Unbreakable, except instead of green it was an orange-ish type of color. He really had a threatening pose, and he didn’t move at all. In fact, he seemed to be staring right at me, and then the bus passed by another building, and he was gone.

It was a little freaky.

I wondered if that guy was Death, and if I was about to die. It would be pretty poetic, I think, to have everyone see Death in some shady form right before they die, although if that was really true, I’m sure we would have heard about it by now– someone would have shouted out “I saw him!” right before they got hit by a train or something, and, at the very least, Mythbusters would have covered the idea as an urban legend. But I was riding backwards on the bus, so I didn’t know if there was a gas truck headed for us, or if a bomb was about to end half of Chicago, or what was going to happen. So for a second there, I thought it might be it for me.

But I was ok, because of something I thought of earlier this week.

I’ve been busy lately. Not really busy, but I’ve just had a lot of things I want to get done, and not enough time to do them in. I usually have a to-do list full of stuff, and lately it seems like there’s not enough hours in the day for everything on there. And it occurred to me the other day that there’s no reason that will be any different when I die. If there’s always so many things I have to do, there will eventually be something I have to leave undone.

Whenever I die, I will still have things left on my to-do list.

Morbid? Yes, but again, this is the season of morbidity– if we’re ever going to think about it, now’s the time.

But it’s also kind of relaxing. The to-do list will never be done, so don’t worry about finishing it. It kind of frees me to do what I want, instead of simply the next thing on the list. I don’t necessarily have to worry about that “laundry” so much (although I’m kind of getting into the ugly shirts already) as finish that “story” I’ve been working on. And if I want to take the whole to “reorganize my DVD collection,” that’s OK, too. If I’m doing what I want to do, things are good.

So if the weird guy staring at me in the orange hoodie ever shows up again, I’ll be ready.