Survivors at All Ages

 Survivors at All Ages

 The older you get the more dead people you know. Or knew.

The price of experience.

A sad truism, this rate of the knowledge of the dead, especially those that you knew personally. Recently reconfirmed to me by Philip Roth, a famous writer of fiction. He turned 80 a few years ago and announced that he had given up writing (two years before he had given up the craft at 78, then announced it publicly). He reads now instead of writing, as an octogenarian, these past five years or so. Thanks for joining the rest of us!

He lamented that he missed seeing the publications of past comrades, now in his elderly years.

Poor guy. Join the rest of us, in our own melancholy ways, while many of us a bit younger.

Those of us not famous ones, we suffer the same as the known and renowned. We live on and know loss of loved ones, and others that should be still around.

We all miss our comrades. And we see it, feel it, more as we age.

Thus it was ever so.

There are those that I have known that have passed on, much too early. Many of them had unique talents and insights, ways to see things and contribute that are no longer available. The years of their demises?

2001. 2003. 2014. 2016.

All of us were products of the 20th century, the century that produced awful sidebars that took away countless young lives in the forms of world wars, cold wars, hot wars, or simply disease and starvation. Millions die young, there is no doubt.

You might call us the Vietnam generation.

The very young and the very old, and everyone in between, we all pass on.

But were we productive while we lived? What did we leave?

Two of those above left progeny, a son and a daughter. Two did not pass on their genes, apparently.

They all left legacies, as sons, uncles, brothers, friends, associates.

Memories now. In the present, as we contemplate.

Jeremy, Bobby, Brent, and Rob.

They died by different ways, some unknown by most. We know that one was by prescribed drugs.

Jeremy did drugs since middle school, I believe heavier in high school. Those things I am confidant that I do know. But I don't know if his death was drug-related.

Bobby had some dreams and aspirations for the Hollywood scene. He died in Los Angeles right before I moved there.

Those were the early two thousands.

More recently, Brent and Rob died. They were alone in Northern Virginia. They had their sets of friends from what I know, but they must have been lonely. Friendly faces and relationships were available to them, this I do know for certain.

I feel like a survivor when I think about these smart, friendly, create gentlemen: I wake up, and like Philip Roth in in his recent interview with the New York Times, I am grateful to be alive. He is 85. I am now in my late 40s. Much longer, in terms of days lived, than the ones I describe.

To wake up every day, still alive.

We are survivors at all ages, which means we have outlasted many cohorts and past acquaintances.

We were not sent on the ill-fated mission that blew up a soldier at the point of his squad in Afghanistan (2017).

We were not involved in that bad car snafu that took the lives of unexpected victims.

We did not contract the disease (take your pick) that disabled and then sucked the life from us as children, adolescents, or adults.

We were blessed and lucky, all the way.

I suppose when people talk about survivor's guilt it is associated with tragic accidents or events that kill some and  leave others spared, thinking of the fact that they survived those brushes with the Hereafter.

Over time we are all looking at our continued existence as such. We think of the contrast of being alive while these others sleep.

I definitely think of the lost talent of those four. The impact that they may have sustained had they lived. More spouses, children, co-workers, works, projects, ideas...

I wish that I in some capacity could make or compensate for the losses of them, but in the end I write these sad prosaic passages reflecting about them and me.

Like Pablo Neruda who wrote powerful verses as a youth, I could write the saddest verses this night. This morning while still alive.

But also like Neruda, I survived and I remember.

Bobby 1971-2001.
Jeremy 1972-2003.
Brent   1974-2014.
Rob     1989-2016

Keep dreaming of the future and the past.