This week has been chilly weather on the cusp of spring and a feeling of being rattled by randomness, which is part of general anxiety and also uneasy feelings that bloom when things seem on the surface to be going entirely well. Monday was a strange day, which included the news from another high school friend that my best friend from age 14-18 had died last month. I would occasionally interact with her on facebook but hadn't really been close to in the intervening years due to distances and changing kinds of lives. I vaguely recalled some discussion of health problems in the fall, before my own world slipped of its axis and I spent less time on social media for a while, but apparently the facebook algorithm, while it shows me all sorts of non-important things daily, neglected me to show that she had slipped away, including numerous memorial posts on her page. It was also her birthday on Monday, which is probably how our other friend made the discovery when she went to wish her a happy one.
My parents were often obsessed with obits, first in daily papers and then online. My dad's weekly call usually included the sentence I saw XYZ died with a name I wasn't familiar with, some schoolmate or past co-worker, which at his advanced age, happened on the regular as people reached their late 70s and 80s. My mom jokingly liked to say all along she liked to check to make sure she was still alive because she felt dead sometimes due to various aches and ailments. It seems impossible that as I get older, this becomes a thing. not checking the obits, but watching people your age die around you more and more. I am not quite ready for that.
In my 20s and 30s it happened occasionally, usually drugs or suicide and occasional tragic accidents. But the increase will steadily be not just these anomalies, but cancers and illness and heart problems that takes all of us out. It will become routine and less shocking, but I still don't see how. Even covid, which skirted the fringes of my family and social groups, taking out parents and grandparents, seemed a freakish set of circumstances, and not just the regular effects of time and decay. In fact, it had been my mother that alerted me that the friend in question's parents had died, her mother while we were in college, her dad in more recent years. She had gone on to have three daughters in their pre-teen and teen years, and had actually somehow become an environmental educator just as she'd been planning in high school (and her ravenous interest in science had been one of the factors that fueled my own.) A few months back, when cleaning out my dad's house, we'd stumbled on a box with letters I'd received in college from high school friends, including a stack from her, in the years before e-mail. I thought about keeping them, maybe taking some pics and tagging the friends on socials, but wound up just tossing them in all the overwhelm.
As for grief, full-bodied, it lives in the house of my mind, but I spend a lot of time creaking open doors and slamming them shut, particularly before I fall asleep, which lets all the anxiety monsters out to play. There may be a time when I am not so quick to shut the doors, to sit in those rooms,.but I don't know. Some have been locked tight for years. At the same time I sometimes also have trouble falling asleep because I am excited about things, about the next day and what I get to do or write about or make, so it's good and bad in equal measure. Another friend is having a hard time due to aging parent dementia fragility stuff and I haven't even the slightest clue what to say or how to help her beyond sending random dumb texts to make sure she's alright. Things like my own grief and other people's grief makes me feel like the world never quite prepared me to be a real human. Otherwise, I am just waiting for proper spring and April and another birthday. I occasionally kinda sorta forget how old I am and am startled when I realize it again. When I turn 49, it will actually be the beginning of my fifth decade alive--a whole half-century. Most days I feel like I hit peak adulting at 26 or 27 and am still there. Sometimes all of it seems so heavy I need to take a nap. Like one of those goats that frightens easily and faints.
So I guess the theme of the week is that I am old as hell, and everyone is probably dying, even me somehow, but there are strange new collages and new poems, Italian sodas and fun slasher movie dates. Sweet, needy cats I spend my days with and new dresses and new paper goods in the shop. Plus getting to make money writing about feng shui and kitchen knives and Renaissance scientists. And maybe if you fill life with enough of these things, enough to distract you, you'll forget that hourglass in the corner that eventually runs out with a trickle.
