Searching my hard drive just now for something or other, I found an old archive of email from a friend and — the ADD kicking in — was reading about plans we were making five years ago to get together for a doggy play date, when it hit me.
I am the only one mentioned in that thread who isn’t dead. My friend, her dog, my dog: all gone.
I guess that kind of experience will happen more and more often should I remain not dead.
> You JUST NOW figured that out??
Wow… Talk about rude…
Actually I think that line is from HANNAH AND HER SISTERS. Woody Allen says “We’re gonna die, the show is gonna die, the network is gonna die, the audience is gonna die!”
Julie Kavner (whom you know as the voice of Marge Simpson): You’re just figuring this out now?
And then he answers “But doesn’t that just RUIN everything for you?”
(I love that movie.)
My beloved neighbors who passed away about ten years ago, said that was the hardest part of getting older… realizing that your circle of friends is diminishing. They said if you make it into your late eighties, the circle becomes very small indeed, and not necessarily populated by the ones with whom you share fondest memories.
When the tornado sirens went off, they used to keep sitting on the back porch with their iced tea, watching the storm while everyone else scrambled to the basements.
I hope you remain not dead (and not dogless) for a long time to come. (Not dogless whenever you are ready to be with dog again.)
yeah…true. some of my family is getting pretty old and unwell lately. it’s all a little freaky.
I can’t decide whether that’s a disturbing thought, or a comforting one.
Death per se doesn’t bother me; missing loved ones and things going on does.
That said, I hope we’ll both be sticking around a good while yet.
Carrie, I figure it out every year or so, and it’s ALWAYS surprising.
Nice to know that rude and truthful are mutually exclusive!
(does my butt look big in these shorts?)
Go away, Carrie.
Excuse my forwardness, but you’d better remain not-dead for a while yet. Who’s going to make me laugh with snarky random comments if you die?
Love the image of the older women, gathered to observe approaching storms. All cats will die: may as well be curious.
But what to do with the thoughtful 20 year olds who—mesmerized by our planetary storm— want to join the porch-sitters?
Death per se doesn’t bother me; missing loved ones and things going on does.
Both of them bother me. One of them I eventually get over. My backup plan for the other I haven’t been able to test under field conditions, and doesn’t have a high likelihood of success, so for now I’ll stick to getting over the sense of loss, thanks.
What’s become weird and somehow William-Gibsonesque about the deaths of people I know is the manner in which I know them. The person that really brought this home to me was Steve Gilliard. I felt sorrow over his death, have had to frequently remind myself that his unique voice and opinions are gone… and we never met. He was “only” an online acquaintance, despite being a short train ride away. Yet I still miss that online persona, regardless of how much of it was the real him. I realized that I had had a similar reaction to the passing of another familiar online personality, without even thinking about how I was acquainted with him.
So, does this simply mean that I need to get some actual flesh-and-blood acquaintances, or was John Donne foretelling the rise of the Internet?
mds - I suppose I wasn’t that clear.
I am not afraid of death, though it’s not like I’m running out in search of it prematurely either. It will happen to me and everyone and everything I love eventually, and it’s not like there’s anything I can do about it, so dwelling on my own death in and of itself doesn’t seem so interesting or fruitful for me. It’s like birth - I don’t have a choice about how and when I die, so it’s not something I can screw up or opt out of or do differently. I will die someday, and so will the people and things I love, and that’s the entirety of the truth of it for me. So death in and of itself doesn’t worry me.
But thinking about being left behind by others when they die is troubling and sad.
Thinking about leaving others behind when I die is also troubling and sad.
Thinking about leaving this intriguing complicated world, and it rolling along doing interesting things without me bothers me too.
But the mechanism by which the last three things occur - death - doesn’t trouble me that greatly.
I miss my dead loved ones, and I don’t look forward to missing others when they or I die. But it’s not the death part that scares me - it’s the separation that goes along with it.
(My perspective may be colored by my experience of numerous childhood moves - when I left, my friends were GONE and stayed gone, as surely as if they had died. Not one friendship that I formed on my own as a child has lasted. Not. One. Those people could be alive, or they could be dead, and the effect is identical from my (selfish) perspective. That’s what I’m getting at - the means by a permanent, lasting separation is inflicted are less worrying to me than the separation itself.)
Funny: I’ve been thinking about this lately. It occurred to me some years back that I used to think I knew something about mortality, and then the next year I’d realized I hadn’t known shit about mortality the year before, and the year after that, ditto, et cetera ad, well, about now I guess.
I’d learned some hard sorrowmaking lesson every year, and it had turned my world inside-out until you’d think I’d've run out of dimensions to be outside of. Or in. Never quite calculated that one.
Then I gave up thinking I knew anything about it except for the stepwise individual things I’d learned, the atoms of perspective, the points of darkness that didn’t really compose a picture. It wasn’t a matter of just now noticing; it was something I knew I’d never know. Except now I know more than I did. Except that there’s no end to this knowledge and every bit of it is a cut with a rusted razor. Just when you think you’ve run out of skin, it finds somewhere else to cut.
At some point after my sister Jeanne died, my sister Ellen and my sister Julie and my brother Pat and I all looked at each other and realized that all of us except a random one would have to live through this again. It hurt physically; it hurts physically, somewhere gut-deep where some organ I didn’t know I had is being torn at, right now just to type about it. There are
were
six of us all together, and every loss is going to hurt this badly but in some place we can’t predict and can’t brace for or protect.
We didn’t say anything then, but we knew we were all having the same thought; we each referred to it, to that moment, later. And of course that’s part of the pain. That’s the part that hurts so much when it gets torn out.
Part—the worst part, maybe—of figuring out mortality is, yes, knowing that you’re going to feel that pain again because everyone you love is as mortal as you. Or, worse, that you’re going to cause that pain in the people you love, who love you, someday. Yes it’s worse. I made a serious suicide attempt nearly 40 years ago and then, a couple of years later, saw the result of two friends’ suicides, felt it and saw what it did to other people, to lovers and ex-lovers and families. I knew I could never do that to anyone. What passes for my ethics would not permit me to even consider that seriously ever again.
(The other part… ANother part of knowing mortality is knowing that causing that pain in your beloveds is the only alternative to the colder humiliating insult of physical and mental deterioration, which of course causes similar pain all ‘round. And it is humiliating, make no mistake. It would still be humiliating if no one ever witnessed it.)
I thought I knew something when people had died in my arms, under my touch, in spite of my best efforts or amid my best efforts to ease their passing. I could only hoped the latter had some good effect. Hah.
I thought I knew something when my parents died—I joked to my sibs that I was the next in line, on the conveyor over the cliff; I’m the eldest. Hah. Not that either. I think I’m out of illusions about knowing mortality now and I also know damned well that’s a lie, a delusion.
Denial on a daily basis is the only reason anyone on Earth can manage to draw one more breath.