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When my father died last month, it made me think more about death and dying.

I don’t mean to be morbid. I’ve gone through several phases with this now.

First was a certain disbelief. This was followed with just being numb. Then, I talked about it to the point that the emotion was overcome by the commonness of it.

It’s been a sad reality.

Not to be funny, but death is just so final. It’s the ultimate can’t-do-over.

It makes you not want to mess up. Every moment passes only once. The few seconds you just spent clicking here and reading to this point in this article will never happen again. You may have another similar experience–But, this moment is gone forever.

All this thinking about death and dying has brought me to a really weird, undesirable conclusion.

I would like to say we have a choice, but we don’t.

We will die one of two ways. Thus the title: Two ways to die.

I’m not talking about the method of death: some illness or physical calamity or failure. I’m talking about the general circumstance of death and dying.

I don’t like it, but here it is:

You will either watch everyone you know die, or, you will die first.

They can’t rightly be called options, but plainly stated: you’re either dying first or watching everyone else die. It isn’t any better when you flip it.

I guess the best of pain and living would be to die somewhere in the middle. Then you live a little longer and only have to watch half of everyone die.

This gets ridiculous fast.

The only real choice in the matter is about how we live. The death part doesn’t change. Even if you believe in life after death, that death part really sucks. And the part leading up to it isn’t that great either.

So make the most of what is good and worthy while you have it. It will be gone.

Hope for somewhere in the middle for dying. But change what you can control.

What can you control? All the life part you’re living right now.

Like, what are you going to do now–I mean, right now?

Click to another site? Email this to a friend as a sick joke? Post this to your own blog and spread a sick joke?

These are some of a million things you might do in the next few moments.

I hope that’s the best use of your next few moments. You sure wouldn’t want to waste them.

Hug your wife and kids. Hug your mom and dad. Eat out whenever you can.

Honor God and man with all that belongs to them. Prioritize some fun into your life. Take a trip. Plant a garden. Send a card.

Don’t keep doing anything that causes regret. Find a handle to overcome bad habits. Create a place for peace in your life. Think about good things.

Regards.

I’ve been blogging with WordPress now for just over two months. I actually posted my first article on Feb. 20, 2006.

It didn’t take long to realize the significant traffic this would generate, not to mention actually being fun for me. I had almost 12,000 pages viewed the first full month, in March. April just finished up with right at 16,000 pages viewed.

So, now I am learning how to use WordPress to make things work like I want. That means learning some PHP as well as learning how to hack javascript into a post. Also, getting things to look like you want means some knowledge of style sheets too.

I hadn’t ever used PHP very much. In fact, most of my programming skills are from finding an example and tweaking it to suit my needs. I know just about enough of a lot of languages just to get around a little.

So, the way WordPress is arranged using PHP inline with HTML makes it really easy to grab things and position them as you want.

When I set up the search that comes with WordPress, I realized it was tied with the settings for the number of posts that are viewed in a category or archive on one page at a time.

So, to get the search right, you want 10 to 20 posts on each page. Otherwise the visitor will think there is only one hit for their search in your articles. The problem is: I don’t want that many posts on the non-search pages. I was getting around to creating an ‘if’ statement in the PHP to make the search page the only one that displayed more posts. But, I tried the Google Search bar instead.

I know you’ve seen the Google Search Bar on sites for years. I never really thought about it until now. It allows the visitor to select your web site in the search. It’s really cool. I like it much better for the way it displays the search results like a search engine. And it’s fast too.

You can put it anywhere you want in your site. I have it at the bottom of all my posts except here also in this post just to point it out.

It has a really easy wizard to click your options and allows you to input up to three websites to include in the search results. It’s an incredible search tool for your blog, or any site you have.

I just put it up tonight. I already love it.

If you aren’t using the Google search on your site, just click the link here: