Way to put my life's struggles in perspective, that's for sure.
I do not like using #firstworldproblems except in irony, because each person's struggle is individual, but there are people in this world who have taken on more than their personal burdens and acted to change the world.
My own feelings on Mandela are complicated -- I am never sure whether I can separate the man from his terrorist affiliations, even if terrorism becomes revolutionary if it changes things for the "better" -- but the inspiration he's provided to others is enough by itself.
He will be missed, but in the sense of dying twice*, his second death is a long, long way off.
*"Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?” ― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
or, more recently: "They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and the second, a bit later on, when somebody mentions your name for the last time." - Bansky
“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
― David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
