This morning
I have to go to a funeral mass for a co-worker’s wife.
He is a consummate professional, the quintessential gentleman whose dress, grooming, and demeanor are always impeccable. She was a Lady of the first water, a woman of style and grace, and exuberant friendliness.
When I was younger I saw people refer to my recently deceased elders as ‘So young” and wag their heads. It made no sense to me, they weren’t young, they were old! At least, they were a damned sight older than me!!
The lady in question is not much older than me. More and more, I attend funerals of people my age or even younger than I.
I suppose under other circumstances I would be pleased to still be around. Small comfort, though, is the loss of someone decent while the worthless abound.
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Funerals are always a marker in life. I’ve not needed to attend any of late and we have buried most of the adults from my childhood. Now I suppose we will need to start burying the adults from my adulthood.
Sad times indeed.
Just last year I went to a funeral of someone my age whose first name was also Dave. He just dropped dead while mowing the lawn.
Sorry to hear that. Anybody I knew?
I have observed the ineluctable march of days, from first drivers’ licenses, college graduations, weddings, Baptisms, Confirmations, kids’ HS graduations, and now, weddings of my friends’ kids and funerals of friends. Ben Jonson stuck his finger in it when he railed against “the old bald- headed cheater,” Time.
You know you are old when you attend more funerals than parties. That bit of truism from my late father who loved a party.
Amen to that, just found out this afternoon one of the ‘kids’ I trained is dead at 46 of stomach cancer…
The mass was at ten, and I arrived a good bit early. other co workers were there, and the mass was a very nice one.
They had a thirtysomething lady sing Ave Maria, and she was perfect, the pianist was likewise wonderful, and I wept, involuntarily, at the beauty of it, of her voice, at the sadness of a man wed to the same woman 40 years who will tonight sleep in his own bed for the first time in weeks- he never left her side at the hospital. And tomorrow he will wake up really alone for the first time, and it will feel like losing a limb. What could you even begin to say or do?
I got word a good friend from Sweden passed away yesterday of complications of the flu. He’d had his inoculation back in the fall, as always, but fell ill on the 7th and was gone in 3 days. We’d spent a good deal of time talking on the 5th, last Wednesday, about a common medical interest cause we shared, and his cohort over there has lost a leader.
“And tomorrow he will wake up really alone for the first time, and it will feel like losing a limb. What could you even begin to say or do? ”
When I lost my first wife of 15yrs just knowing friends and family cared about how I felt was a great comfort. Most of my buddies are tongue tied in situations like that anyway and I knew it.
Couple of years back a friend of a friend dropped dead. Literally. Mowing the yard, wife went in for some tea, came back out and he was gone.
Friend was halfway in shock; this guy was retired Army, several years in SF, in top condition, and our age. And just gone in a flash.
Sometimes show, sometimes fast; you just never know.