Requiem for a Generation

My first and best friend, whom I have known for all 81 years of our lives, has been struck down with a stroke, brain tumor, and second stroke. He is currently installed in a special intensive care hospital that I am certain will be his penultimate resting place. I am horrified and upset by this unexpected event as he was expected to live at least four or five years longer, or so he recently informed me. We were small children and played together almost daily, went through 12 years of school together, shared all the adventures of adolescence together: fishing, hunting, hiking, working, girls, everything. We parted as he joined the army and I went off to college, but always kept in touch and in recent years have been close friends once again. When you lose someone like that, with whom you were so close and shared so much, it is like losing part of yourself. He was such a good man, married to the same woman for over 50 years, a father and grandfather, honest, hard-working, and kind. I cannot remember him ever saying a bad word about anyone, he never fought with anyone but was brave and strong, never cheated, and so far as I know never did an unkind act of any kind. I know one is supposed to speak highly of the dead, or not at all, but in this case the praise is entirely warranted. I sincerely wish I could say the same things about myself. Of course I will miss him and my life will not be the same.


Thinking now of those of my generation that were important parts of my life, a few are still alive and doing well, considering their ages and health. Of my High School graduation class of (wow) 37, I know that at least seven or eight are still alive. But so many others have gone, a good friend and college roommate dead by his own hand, another dead from the booze, one crippled with terrible Parkinson’s, another totally incapacitated by strokes, another with Alzheimer’s, my son’s Godmother dead from cancer, his Godfather rendered helpless from strokes, and others gone from cancer and heart disease, one or two others just mysteriously disappeared completely, two widowers absolutely miserable and lost without their wives, all of these gone or going on their individual Journeys to the West, carrying their memories and secrets and experiences with them. It is not a pretty picture, but one that I’m sure is typical of those fortunate enough to have lived into their eighties or nineties.

Of course people strive to avoid their inevitable fate, to live as long as possible, “rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” and the ideas of death and dying are not pleasant, but then, who would want to live forever? Death, after all, is not more unnatural than life, in fact is part of life. Is it not comforting to know that after years of toil, strife, anxiety, fear, and seemingly endless challenges to overcome, there is going to be an end, a finish, a completion, a time of complete and blissful peace? Do we not, when our time is near, wish it to come quickly, mercifully, and without undue complications and suffering? No one wishes to die prematurely, slowly and painfully, but does there not come a time when one wishes, even looks forward, to the end? Life can be pleasant, it is true, a wonderful gift from the Great Mystery, something to be treasured and treated with respect, but it is also hard, fraught with the demons and mysterious evils, frustrations and triumphs, victories and defeats, the very things make it what it is. Is not its peaceful end perhaps the greatest experience and triumph of all, the moment that brings the most revealing epiphany?

How appropriate,
when the Great Mystery calls,
to leave in autumn.

Morialekafa