"All the complexities and games
No one wins, but somehow, they still play
All the missing crooked hearts
They may die, but in us they live on"
Last weekend a friend lost a brother to a heart attack. When it first came to my attention that he'd lost someone, I didn't know who that someone was, and when a quick search on obituaries turned up someone in their 50s, my mind naturally gravitated to "must be an uncle". It was only later when I discovered it was his brother that I did the simple math in my own head and thought "he was about the same age as my brother". On that same weekend, a good friend of mine received word a friend of his was rushed to hospital, also with a possible heart failure. He was more fortunate, though he remains under observation for the time being.
These events made me realize that I've reached a new era of life. When you're a child, grandparents and great aunts and uncles die. As you get older, eventually you and the people around you start losing parents. Have I reached that age where I need to ponder the mortality of friends and family of my own generation?
I've written before about both the recognition of one's own mortality as an important life lesson and that the notion of "carpe diem" is a novel thought but requires too much energy to be practical (but that's okay, really). The world's most renowned teacher of "living in the moment" had a brain hemorrhage a few days ago. (He survived and is recovering.)
As an Apathetic-Agnostic-Taoist-with-a-touch-of-BuddhismTM, one of the glaring weaknesses of my faith is my inability to convince myself or anyone else that there's some grand meaning behind it all, which, unfortunately, makes me a pretty shitty friend when it comes to consoling people, though I have a system I do my best to follow. I wish there was more I could do.
That fact of the matter is, that while I accept I'm not going to be around forever, and neither is Liza-Ann, all my friends and family, and so on, I hardly feel satisfied and I'm certainly not ready to cash in my chips. It's not because I have some lofty vision of some laudable goal I haven't accomplished yet; I won't be curing cancer or inventing a better light bulb. But after a rough start, I've finally reached a point in my time here where I'm pretty content with the life I've carved out for myself, and "growing old with Liza-Ann" and "watching Olivia grow up" are two of the only things on a very short, simple bucket list, and both require my continued existence for some years to come.
So as an AATw/toB (Note to self: I need a better acronym), prayer is out, but I'll take my pills, and my vitamins, and go get some exercise raking those leaves in the yard before a friend shows up for a board game. When you don't believe in a divine plan, you get to pick your own reasons. I've had the house to myself all weekend and I've spent a considerable part of it doing housework, just to see that moment of relief on my lover's face when my girls get back from camping.
Totally worth it.
"So persistent in my ways,
Hey angel, I am here to stay
No resistance, no alarms,
please this is just too good to be gone
I believe,
And I believe 'cause I can see,
Our future days,
Days of you and me"
