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My friend, the hero

In the essay, "Notes of a Native Son," James Baldwin reluctantly attends his father's funeral. When he is led up to the casket to view his father, he realizes his own mortality and the sad truth of the world around him.
He was simply an old man dead, and it was hard to believe that he had ever given anyone joy or pain. Yet, his life filled that room. Further up the avenue his wife was holding his newborn child. Life and death so close together, and love and hatred, and right and wrong, said something to me which I did not want to hear concerning man, concerning life. (Baldwin, 65)
Baldwin's bitter realization—for everything good, there is bad—paints a bleak, but realistic picture of our existence as human beings. Baldwin's perception of "life and death so close together" (Baldwin, 65) brings me back to an event in my past, where this irony presented itself clearly to me.
It was October 29th, 2001 and my best friend, Krista's, health was diminishing more and...

Posted by: Joel Chibota

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