Truth be told

I was just pondering my last post and it made me sad.  Not just that I had lost a friend but that we are all getting older and more and more of our time will be spent at funerals and memorials.  I worry constantly about my friends, my retiree friends.  I want to hold them so close so nothing will happen to them.  I worry that I will lose them, or that they will suffer some of the ultimate losses that makes going on so hard.  And as most of my friends are women I worry about them losing their husbands, their soulmates.  Sophie, dear woman that she is, was the first to lose a husband.  She did not misplace him.  He died sixteen years ago.  It was a New Year's Eve/Day when he died at home.  And that home was no longer a home for Sophie.  Sixteen years have passed and she now seems more assured of herself.  But it took growing pains of sixteen years.  Seem is 70 now and my friends who are in their 70s now when they will suffer a loss, and they will, might it take them sixteen years to move on, if at all?

Hyphen dear sweet Hyphen was always the one who would point out we never know what life has in store for us.  And that hit her so hard in the end that she is no longer able to practice.  The traumatic brain injury so injurious as to make it hard for her to think.  But Hyphen dear sweet Hyphen would opine that is the way of the world.  You just never know.

I worry that the cats grow older.  I look in the mirror and wonder where I went. Time is a thief.

And yet...

I was out walking this morning and decided to change my route.  I meandered through a new neighborhood for me and as a hawk swooped down and landed in front of me and I pondered this meaning, I looked up as he flew off to see, through the buildings, a huge man-made lake surrounded by homes.  Of course this proved to be a private lake, the bastards, and I couldn't get any closer than
the road.  For those of you in the area it is between Harrison and Coolidge on Chartwell Dual...So if Hope is a thing with feathers, this young hawk showed me the hope of the lake.  Of people enjoying ann early morning on the lake, a shimmering clear sand-bottomed lake (none of this muddy lake for these home dwellers), shimmering under the morning sun.

Some days I find growing old to be a gift and not a thief.  Some days the concept of being a crone is very appealing.  I think the crone is the female counterpart, in a good sense, of a curmudgeon.  We are wise from our years, we have learned from our years.  Yes, I am still dealing with past hurts in therapy but the new hurts pass much more quickly as I learn to be still and let the time sink into me.  Yes, the cats grow old, but at least they do.  It is better than the options.  Yes, I worry about losing them.  I worry every time my Aunt Marilyn calls early in my day from California that she is calling to tell me someone has died.  I listen to her contemplate being 85 and all her ills, both mental and physical, and hear her fret about growing old and the fear in her voice.  I am twenty three years her junior and some days I feel that fear.

I shall bypass the long philosophical question and quest of what happens when we die.  I think that is just that.  I worry about the pain of dying.  Yes, I have heard from others as they watched loved one pass, that as the body dies in stages it is painful, not quite the dying in the sleep we all ultimately hope for but more often than not a morphine induced haze to make the transition tolerable.

So aside from the pain of dying and the questions about the soul, should there be such an entity, I have no complaints.  I hope to have a life well lived and live I shall.  I shall enjoy the cats, the yard, my roses, my home, my neighbors, my neighborhood, the raccoons who live in my trash can...yes all this and heaven too.  Life will go on after I have gone on and that is as it should be.