I was a late child of respectively, the youngest of four (my dad) and the younger of two (my mom). Dad was 34 when I was born, Mom was 31. My grandparents were all gone by the time I was 19. (My paternal grandmother died several years before I was born.)*
So I grew up with family dying around me. Almost all of my cousins are 10+ years older than me (and I’ve already lost two of them — one was in the submarine service back in the ’60s and committed suicide in the ’70s, the other — retired Navy LCDR — died of various and sundry ills at 58 in 2006.). All my aunts and uncles are dead, Dad’s dead, and Mom is 92 and getting frail.
The love of my life…before my wife came along 20 years ago, and even then (yeah, my wife knows, and she also knows I’m too straight-laced to stray)…died of lupus at 57, six years ago come May 20. I still haven’t fully dealt with her death. (She’s a character in my WiP, I think that’s how I’m doing that.)**
Another woman I dated years ago died at 51 in ’08. Cancer. Several ladies I knew in college went in their 40’s from cancer.
A couple of male friends died far too early in accidents or just from ill health.
My wife has had several close friends pass since we got married (including one she considered her sister of another mother — and that’s how we ended up with a grown-up “daughter” and grandkids), and she doesn’t understand how I deal with it so calmly when she goes all to pieces.
The love of my life I wrote about, up there? Didn’t/Couldn’t even shed a tear at her funeral. On the other hand, she was definitely in a better place, so that’s probably part of the reason why.
Gonna admit that I lost it when my Dad died. But only once.
The obituary pages, even before COVID, suggest I could go to funerals at least a couple of times a week.
Strangely enough, I know no one who has either had, or died from, COVID.*** At second-hand, there have been a couple of people whose deaths were attributed to COVID, but who likely died from something else that COVID just helped along.
At any rate…
Death has always been a part of life, as long as I can remember. I don’t know how it could have been any other way. Which is why I just frankly can’t be moved about the WuFlu. Especially since we seem to have been lied to from the start about how it was going to spread in this country. As I keep trying to point out, there’s no way the lockdown “flattened the curve” to the extent that it has apparently been flattened. There are too many people exempt from lockdown orders, too many cars on the road, too many people in the stores, and too much evidence that the lockdown orders didn’t make any difference anyway (and may have made things worse by hindering the development of “herd immunity”) for me to take any of it seriously at this point.
As Sarah Hoyt is fond of saying, “Olly olly oxen free!” It’s May Day. Take it back from the Commies and make it a day of freedom.
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* A lot of people who know how old I am (and you will, here, in a moment, if you don’t already) are surprised when they find out my Dad fought in France in World War II. He was drafted in ’43 and went to Europe in ’44. He came back and went to college on the GI Bill, and didn’t marry my mother till ’51, and they didn’t have me until ’59. My sister came along in ’61. So our parents were about 10 years older than those of most of our schoolmates and other contemporaries. If someone we knew had parents as old as ours, they usually had older siblings and were generally considered “the oops”. 🙂
** In case anyone is wondering, she took too long to say “yes” when she had wanted to for a long time, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Long story. Her own fault, she knew it, and she told me later.
*** Which doesn’t leave out the possibility that they had it but were either asymptomatic or had a mild case that wasn’t identified as COVID. For instance, I think I had a mild case of it back in November, 2019. It’s been around a lot longer than most people think, since the fucking Chinese decided it was better to let it spread around the world rather than contain it back in September/October 2019. Never trust China. China is asshole.