Mike Kim, writer, who spent his life showing others how to build lives of meaning by beginning again, passed away at his home last week.
Born in Berkeley, CA to Korean immigrant parents, Mike began teaching in his early twenties, helping junior high and high school students prepare for college entrance exams.
In his early thirties he worked as the worship pastor of a church in Manchester, CT, recording music and writing songs –– work that planted the seeds for the wider writing and speaking that would come later. After stepping away from Christian ministry, a decade in marketing and brand strategy followed during which he became a bestselling author and entrepreneur.
After a 12-year marriage ended, Mike entered his forties living the stories he eventually used to teach others: that a meaningful life is not built once but begun again, and again, and again. Mike helped entrepreneurs clarify what they were building, authors craft books they were proud to put their names on, and honored his faith by standing behind servant leaders doing hard work in remote places.
Mike was a loving son, brother, and uncle, and a devoted companion to each of his dogs. He held several of his closest friendships for decades, some who had seen him at every stage of his evolutions. His faith was the longest relationship of his life, quieter in his later years than in his early ones but no less real.
Mike is survived by a small circle of friends and family and a body of work that will outlast him. Read something he wrote, or better, begin something of your own. He believed you could always begin again.
I wrote this “reverse obituary” in April, six months ago.
I don’t recall what prompted it but clearly death was on my mind. It resurfaced this past week when I came to Virginia to be with my mom after her husband, Chick, passed away.
I’ve never read many memoirs or biographies, but over the last two years I’ve been working through titles in that vein.
This past year I read Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius. Aurelius was emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 AD and spent much of that time on the frontier fighting wars along the Danube. At night he wrote notes to himself: reminders, arguments, little scoldings.
Since his notes were never meant to be read, he never gave it a title. It was found after he died and copied for nearly two thousand years.
What strikes me is how close such a powerful man lived to death. I kept picturing him the way he was portrayed in Gladiator: cold marshlands, men shivering in the rain, short on food and fire, fighting for gods and country. Death was clear and present in a way my first-world life never requires. A few lines:
- "Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly."
- "Think about your life: childhood, boyhood, youth, old age. Every transformation is a kind of dying. Was that so terrible?"
- "Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy or sloth or pretense."
Around the time my dad passed, I started Matthew McConaughey’s memoir, Greenlights. Tragically, McConaughey’s dad didn’t live long to see him become a star.
His words gave me language for what I was feeling, and now in a different way, for my mother’s husband passing:
"All the mortal things I had been revering in my life suddenly came down to eye level in front of me. All the mortal things I looked down upon suddenly rose up to eye level. Now the world was flat, and I was looking at it in the eye…
It was time to take care of Mom and take care of myself. It was time to sober up from my boyhood whimsy. It was time to become a man, difficult because of my loss, but graceful because of my gain."
I see life very much this way now. I also take comfort in the fact that billions of people have walked through the same shifts in their lives.
A Friend Lost on 9/11
Last month, on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I thought about a classmate and basketball teammate, Scott, who was killed in the attacks at just 22.
Scott and I played together for five years, going back to junior high. His dad was our rec league coach. He was a great athlete, good-looking guy, popular, and a three-sport star. I always wished I could be like him.
One of my clearest memories with Scott is standing next to each other, probably in 9th grade, watching an after-school fight alongside the rest of our grade, gathered with our proverbial popcorn as if we were watching a UFC card. Kids being kids.
I think about what Scott never got to experience and everything I have. Subconsciously, I’ve been using his passing as a push-off point all these years to experience a lot in life because his was so short.
Life is a very, very precious thing.
Recaps of Life are Very Reductionist
I’ve reduced my father, Scott, and Chick to a paragraph in a newsletter. I reduced my own to an imaginary obituary, and a generous one at that! No newspaper is publishing an obituary that long so… I officially dub it an Obitulogy: Obituary + Generous Self-Written Eulogy.
Writing an Obitulogy turned out to be a surprising expression of “live backwards from the end” that Marcus Aurelius and so many others talk about. Try it.
On a gravestone there’s a hyphen between the year born and year died. Since I’m the only one who will live my own life, I’ve decided it would be tragic to not be present in the hyphens.
I hope you can find a deeper way to savor life in the hyphens this week.
Mike Kim