Some of you are digging through the posts because you’re trying to figure out what story remains unwritten and some search for messages stuck between paragraphs.
Could be easier to just ask but doing so might mean having a talk that you may or may not be ready for.
I imagine there are others in the mix who are better equipped for discerning what is meant when some words remain unsaid and that is a different situation indeed.
We’re day or two away from Facebook memories jamming me with flashbacks of the race from Texas back to LA and the long goodbye that went too quickly but felt like forever.
And so the event that pushed me into family history sticks out because right when I reconnect with those we lost touch with I am reminded of those we lost.
It is funny because I saw something someone said online and ran my own search and discovered an unexpected connection.
Not exceptionally close but far closer than I ever would have guessed because I would have said there was none.
I had to grind out the last two days of the week. Got through them by living minute to minute dragging my feet from moment to moment.
Four or five days of vacation would be of huge benefit because I would be a new man, but that is not happening yet.
Neither are my preferred methods of relaxing so I am here grinding it out, not for the first time and probably not for the last.
I can still do what I have to but I feel the physical toll in ways I never used to. Can’t decide if it is age, the perfect storm of chaos now or a combination.
So I stare off in the distance and see the place where I’ll set a candle and watch it burn.
Two years feels like fifty and yet in some ways so much less which is to say the memories feel close enough for me to touch them.
I remember who I was and think about who I am now.
So much was a blur and now some of what I had forgotten is back. I don’t have to ask if I imagined it or if it happened the way I think because I just know.
I am starting to remember the feel of the wood in my hands and the sounds of the dirt filling the grave. Starting to feel the weight in my left hand and the sense of grass beneath my feet.
The faces of those who came and those who didn’t float up to the surface too.
Sometimes I wonder how long I have. There are some pretty good genes that suggest I really do have decades upon decades.
But there are other genes in the mix that I sometimes think about.
I remember dad saying how his mother lost about five siblings in two years.
Grandma was the youngest of her siblings by a significant amount but sometimes I think about it and wonder how many died in their fifties.
My great-grandfather was all of 54 or so, but he died in ’22 and the aunts/uncles who I mentioned passed away in the fifties so there are huge differences.
It is not the same gene pool and medicine is vastly superior.
I don’t worry about death and am not afraid of a natural death. That idea doesn’t bother me much and the part that does isn’t about physical pain.
No, it is the feeling that I have so much I want to do and so much I want to experience that I can’t help but dislike going too soon.
Still sometimes I think about the evolution of the pack and who will one day take my place. It is a useful and interesting exercise or so I think.
