Goodbye Pelé
I got some terrible news today, along with millions of other people on the planet. The man, the legend, Pelé, has passed away at the age of 82. My brother delivered the news in a next message, as he often does, within minutes of it being made public. He also alerted me to the passing of Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, and The Ultimate Warrior. It was a simple text, again as usual, that read "RIP Pelé".
The Brazilian football hero was one of those names that I grew up with. People that were just there, and had always been there. People like the late queen of England, the aforementioned figures - Jackson and Ali. People, some of who had even retired before my birth, like Pelé, that formed the main characters of our matrix. A few of them were world leaders, good or bad, such as Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi, Nelson Mandela, and so on. Some were entertainers like Bruce Forsyth and Barbara Windsor and James Brown. The list is pretty long, all the above are gone from this reality now, confined to celluloid, silicon, memory and text.
We all knew Pelé was sick. Terminally sick even. However we were apparently falsely reassured by his medical team that he wasn't in any grave danger. You know what? They may have believed that too. I actually had this conversation with my sister's husband a couple of weeks back. There are healthy men and women, mainly men, that walk out of a physical with near perfect results, and simply drop dead for no apparent reason. Talk less of an 82 year old man that had been quite sick with a terminal disease.
The truth is, his was a well lived life. "Well" not necessarily signifying the the positive, but rather the thoroughness. He didn't have it easy growing up in Brazil in those days, but he climbed up to the very top of his career. Some even crowned him the absolute king of it. The best of all time. I wasn't really alive yet when he was at his peak, so I don't have any first-hand experience of his game, but I have seen some of it, thanks to the magic of film. I can see why he would have been considered the best of the best by some. His record is definitely going to be hard to beat. That's for sure.
So, one by one, as they dropped off, these characters that define our matrix, they reminded me of the ephemeral nature of life. Life is indeed like a candle in the wind.
Rest in peace, Edson Arantes do Nascimento.
Peace & Love,
Adé