Morte

"The train it won't stop rolling, no way to slow down." - Jethro Tull

 

I'm having a surprisingly hard time dealing with the death of an old friend of mine. She died yesterday after a battle with cancer, and while I knew she had cancer, I had no idea just how sick she was. I hadn't seen her in many years (I dated her for a long time in the 1980's) and so I was removed from the situation, but it's always sad when someone we knew dies. I am suddenly struck with the same creeping dread I had when my parents died, but while not as strong as it was for my parents, this is in one respect harder to deal with due to the simple fact that Mary was my age.

 

Life is short, we all know that. And we also all know we need to live more "in the moment" and enjoy life while we can. But sometimes something happens that slaps you in the face with your mortality and leaves you stinging and reeling and you suddenly look up with wide eyes and see that you really are on a train that is rolling fast and nothing will slow it down and one day that train will pull into your final stop.

 

In the great lottery of statistics, some of us have pulled further destinations than others. Mary wasn't so lucky, her time to get off the train came much too early.

 

Some of us do what we can to eat well and exercise and avoid unnecessary risks, but there are many variables we cannot control and life is fragile and it is fleeting.

 

So in the end, we have what we have. I don't know how far down the line my last stop is, but I do know that it gets closer every minute.

 

But all is not lost.

 

Life goes on for us, the living, for now and hopefully our journeys have many more miles to go and our trains run onward through new lands and good times and when we finally grind to a stop, may it be at the end of the best lives we could live.