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Several weeks ago now I attended the funeral of an acquaintance who had died unexpectedly. I didn't know B personally at all well, we've basically just overlapped at social events, but I have known him and his partner since before they were a couple, so apparently over 25 years. I well liked and respected him, and coincidentally had bumped into him (not literally) a few weeks earlier while we were both filling up on either side of the same petrol pump. I think that would have been the first time we'd met since pre-Covid.
People tend to say nice things at and around funerals, but even so the consensus seems to be that B was one of the best of people, the type of perpetually kind, supportive and uplifting person most of us can only hope to be.
He was also only not-that-many-years older than me, falling in that space between parents and age-group peers. By this time in life, I've always considered that it would be normal to have lost grandparents and some number of my parent's generation to natural causes* and some of my own or younger to tragedies*.
*[Aside: natural causes can also be tragic, and on that note Fuck Cancer, again. I am currently and off the top of my head two or less degrees of separation from 4? 5? 6? people that I know of who are making the most of whatever time they have left after terminal diagnoses. At least two immediate acquaintances are in the liminal space between diagnosis of less advanced cancers and beginning treatment.]
So I think it is something about that intermediate generation starting to "suffer medical events" that made this hit harder than normal. Due to the nature of my social group I have quite few friends of about that age and whose funerals I fully expect to have to attend before I turn in my own boots, and I now find myself viewing those inevitable losses with a new clarity, alongside those of my own age. I'm hopeful that they all have another 30-40 years left in them ...
I have health insurances of course, which eat up a painful amount of our budget each month despite being not as comprehensive as I would like and never have being claimed on, and my will is in order so that D will be as taken care of as whatever assets I have left will allow.
I am growing to resent more and more either my own inability to reach out to people that I want to spend more time with /have more memories of before either I or they are gone, or this rat-race of a society which doesn't leave me with the time or energy to do so.
~~~
Most of this post has been bouncing around in my head since I heard the news of B's death, I just haven't had the time and spoons to get it down. I'm writing it now partly because I do actually have an evening to myself and the spoons to do something with it, but also because I woke up from a dream this morning where most of the family (five of the six of us plus at least one uncle and some number of niblings) had been on a family trip back to Erewhon (there was a lot more going on in the dream but not relevant) and when we were starting to leave my father started to get very emotional because it would be the last time he visited.
I kind of woke up with the thought +feeling? +emotion? that "there is a last time for everything" going around in my head, and I'm not quite sure what to do with it. It's a statement of the obvious, that there must be as many last times for everything as there are first times for everything in a life, even if often they will be the same time.
People tend to say nice things at and around funerals, but even so the consensus seems to be that B was one of the best of people, the type of perpetually kind, supportive and uplifting person most of us can only hope to be.
He was also only not-that-many-years older than me, falling in that space between parents and age-group peers. By this time in life, I've always considered that it would be normal to have lost grandparents and some number of my parent's generation to natural causes* and some of my own or younger to tragedies*.
*[Aside: natural causes can also be tragic, and on that note Fuck Cancer, again. I am currently and off the top of my head two or less degrees of separation from 4? 5? 6? people that I know of who are making the most of whatever time they have left after terminal diagnoses. At least two immediate acquaintances are in the liminal space between diagnosis of less advanced cancers and beginning treatment.]
So I think it is something about that intermediate generation starting to "suffer medical events" that made this hit harder than normal. Due to the nature of my social group I have quite few friends of about that age and whose funerals I fully expect to have to attend before I turn in my own boots, and I now find myself viewing those inevitable losses with a new clarity, alongside those of my own age. I'm hopeful that they all have another 30-40 years left in them ...
I have health insurances of course, which eat up a painful amount of our budget each month despite being not as comprehensive as I would like and never have being claimed on, and my will is in order so that D will be as taken care of as whatever assets I have left will allow.
I am growing to resent more and more either my own inability to reach out to people that I want to spend more time with /have more memories of before either I or they are gone, or this rat-race of a society which doesn't leave me with the time or energy to do so.
~~~
Most of this post has been bouncing around in my head since I heard the news of B's death, I just haven't had the time and spoons to get it down. I'm writing it now partly because I do actually have an evening to myself and the spoons to do something with it, but also because I woke up from a dream this morning where most of the family (five of the six of us plus at least one uncle and some number of niblings) had been on a family trip back to Erewhon (there was a lot more going on in the dream but not relevant) and when we were starting to leave my father started to get very emotional because it would be the last time he visited.
I kind of woke up with the thought +feeling? +emotion? that "there is a last time for everything" going around in my head, and I'm not quite sure what to do with it. It's a statement of the obvious, that there must be as many last times for everything as there are first times for everything in a life, even if often they will be the same time.
