The passing of Doug Mataconis has me thinking about how I react to people who die. When someone much younger than me dies, or when I was a couple decades younger and someone my age or younger dies, I just view it as a tragedy and wonder what happened. Cancer? Accident? Murder?
When someone much older dies, I generally think “ehh, 87, that’s a pretty good run,” and if I knew or liked them I’d be sad, but, you know, they were 87. And you don’t really think about how they died because, well, 87.
But now, at 51, when someone my ages dies, it’s fucking scary. I’ll think I need to make a lifestyle change or two, go on a diet that will at the very last until dinner, and glare angrily at the exercise bike and make sure I have plans to destroy my hard drives and go clean my kitchen and bathrooms. It just hits different.
This Is Effective Civic Action! The Texas Democratic State Legislators Head To DC To Stymie Governor Abbott’s Special Legislative Session and New Voter Suppression Legislation
VeniceRiley
at 60, same same.
egorelick
Same vibe for lesser problems like diabetes, chronic pain, gout, gut issues, prostate problems, or sleep issues. Yeah, the alternative is worse, but I didn’t plan for the degeneration that proceeds death.
cope
@VeniceRiley: At 71, I find myself much more sanguine about it.
Baud
I hope I die after I get old.
MikefromArlington
Ya kinda just start and it becomes a habit after a couple months. It’s like quitting smoking. After a couple months after 20 years I never looked back.
Another thing, I’ve seen you complain about allergies. I used to have them so severe I would get sinus infections. I bought one of those nasal flush bottles with the sachets of some sorta saline powder from Amazon and bam…gone. After years of needlessly suffering. I do it first thing in the morning and I’m grand the rest of the day.
Anyway, best of luck.
artem1s
When my father passed 10 years ago, I started to think about obits much differently. There is something about losing a parent that moves our understanding of death from concept to reality. Stephen King wrote something in one of his books about death and aging that stuck with me. He wrote that there was a point when you look in the mirror and can’t ignore the lines in your face anymore. It wasn’t a clerical error that only happened to other people – it was happening to you too.
rivers
My mother – who died 15 years ago – once said this about awareness of mortality. She said that when her own mother died, it felt as if “the roof had been removed from the house.”
CaseyL
Besides the usual anxiety around dying, I’ve been getting my head around the fact that no one in my immediate family had kids: not me, not my brother, and none of my first cousins on either my Mom’s or Dad’s side.
There’s no point in hanging onto family memorabilia, because there’s no one who’ll be interested in any of it after we’re gone.
It’s genuinely weird to think about an entire branch of my bloodline ending.
(Mind you, I’m VERY glad to have not had kids. It’s just… weird.)
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I don’t plan to die.
John Revolta
Moving a lot of heavy-ass equipment out of my basement yesterday, I’m thinking
Mary G
@CaseyL: Same here. 100 years of family photos that I don’t know what to do with. None of my four cousins wanted them. Should I try to find out if they have children who want them? I’m sure they are MAGAts.
What really makes me feel old is when I see photos of people my age that I haven’t seen in a long time. Ron Howard is about my age and I hadn’t seen a picture of him in quite a while and I was OMG he’s OLD! I must also be OLD! Then I said, nope, I refuse to be old.
lollipopguild
@Omnes Omnibus: I love your attitude.
artem1s
@Omnes Omnibus:
Tom Robbins had some interesting thoughts about that concept in Jitterbug Perfume
Baud
I’m better looking now than when I was younger so that helps.
rikyrah
I understand completely, Cole. I see it the same way. Younger than me – awful.
Same age- horrifying.
80+ , they lived longer than both of my parents, so I consider them blessed.
Benw
@Omnes Omnibus: <clinteastwoodsquint> Plan’s got nothin’ to do with it.
debbie
Late one night trying to get to sleep, Philip Larkin’s Aubade came to mind, along with the realization that I was now in the same situation as the narrator.
Poe Larity
Relax. You are as far from 80 as you are from Desert Storm.
Isn’t pot legal in WV?
Mike S
The men on my father’s side all died young. 60 was the oldest. Surprisingly at 56 I am still not overly concerned about it. I am far more afraid of dementia which was prevalent on my mother’s side.
Omnes Omnibus
@Benw: Gotta start somewhere.
geg6
I had two close friends from my youth who died last week, so I get it. One was 57 and the other 64. Sad and scary.
My high school class has a Facebook group and a classmate who recently retired has been putting up posts with our yearbook pictures, two at a time, and asking if there was updated info on all of us. We are less than halfway through and the number who, it turns out, have passed away is shocking.
sab
@Mary G: I see people I have known for years and they sort of look the same. Then I see somebody new on the hiking trail who looks older than me, and I realize with a jolt that they are probably younger than me, and look younger than me.
CaseyL
@Mary G: My family, and friends I’ve known since before high school, are all far-flung, and though we keep in regular touch, most of us only recently started seeing each other on Skype. I got that same jolt, as some of them I hadn’t seen in person in over 10 years.
Gin & Tonic
Being older now than my father was when he died gives me pause. But I think, well, his life was hard, so maybe I have some extra in the tank.
Al Z.
“If I live too long I’m afraid I’ll die”
sab
My mom died at 84 with a degenerative neurological condition and she was desperate to go. My dad is almost 97, with dementia, severe cataracts and bad teeth and seems happy.
At 67 I am getting comfortable with the idea of mortality. Didn’t “Gulliver’s Travels” have people who aged but never died?
Atul Gawande has a good book on mortality, surprisingly called “On Mortality.
ETA : Oxford comma lost out there. It didn’t seem to work. I probably needed another comma later.
Scout211
Mortality is definitely unfun to think about. But most of us do start thinking about it as we get older.
When I was 51, my mother died of Alzheimer’s after 8 years of slowly dying and quickly losing her cognition.
So for me and my siblings, it is not only mortality that is unfun to think about, it is also the possibility of losing our cognitive abilities that is unfun to think about. Sigh.
The good news is that it is now easy to be grateful for another day, week, month, year that we are still present both physically and cognitively. There’s always a bright side.
The Moar You Know
I got my wake up call this year when a gentleman who I’ve been both friends and musical partners with since high school was found dead in his apartment last October from a fall. At 53. A fall, it pains me to say, that was likely a result of an alcohol addiction that had developed in recent years. I had no idea. I’d gotten married a decade ago and was living in SoCal, he was single and living in NorCal, so it’s not like I’m blaming myself for not knowing, but I do know for at least the first forty years of his life, the guy drinking to excess was almost always me, not him.
I was warned by an older friend of mine a few years back this would happen; he said, to paraphrase, that when you hit your fifties people YOU know, up close and personal, your age, your friends, start dying. And boy he was not wrong.
And I write this lying here at the end of a year-long process that has seen me get a third of my large intestine removed (same thing the Pope just had done, for the same reason) an operation that didn’t exactly go to plan and has resulted in me having four surgeries in four months, this last one hopefully being the last. And I am all too acutely aware at the end of this hellride that my time here, one way or another, is pretty fucking finite.
John, just saying, with all respect; what landed me here was obesity and garbage eating habits. Don’t join my club, man. This would be a shitty, shameful, and frankly agonizing way to die.
swiftfox
The people who shaped 60s pop culture – off the top of my head – van Dyke, Mel Brooks, Jagger-Richards-McCartney-Dylan-Townsend-P Simon, are likely to go about the same time.
Mary G
O/T TBogg performs a curmudgeonly rescue:
I watch animal rescues on YT to lift my spirits, but the happy endings always come so fast and somewhat unbelievably. The dog that was growling and baring his teeth in the alley or the hissing and scratching cat has become a cuddlebug by the time they arrive at the vet’s? I’ve had my cats 10 years and they both hate everyone except occasionally me.
ETA first tweet
satby
We do reality very poorly in this country, and that goes for the reality of death as the finale of all living things. Most people die in hospitals now, not at home; visitations are held at funeral homes, not in the living room. Plus, in this country we (until very recently) had successfully eradicated so many things that caused untimely death that a significant portion of the population can’t wrap their minds around how deadly disease can be, even ones that might be mild for most people, Death starts to seem more of an aberration than an expected outcome of every life unless you live long enough to be elderly.
And when aging starts to affect us and bad luck or poor choices start to nab some of our contemporaries the reminder that all things die sooner or later hits us different ways. Some grab for the wrinkle cream and hair dye, some assess their lives. The ones who do better are the people who assess and prioritze the things they want to do.
sab
@Mary G: Aubrey is not a girl’s name. Audrey is. What was he thinking? The only Aubreys I know are boys, but my husband says there are also girls.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
Good luck with that.
Spanky
And as I’m reading this my phone buzzed with the news that Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Orndorff has died at 71. He was known to have dementia. Probably CTE.
Another marker of our youth gone.
John Revolta
@swiftfox: Funny you should mention those two guys first. Comedians don’t get the same kind of credit for shaping culture as musicians do, but they sure shaped MY outlook on life growing up. I would add Reiner, Sahl, Bruce, Rickles, Pryor and yes, Cosby to the list.
Honus
As I was reading this, a Joe Namath medicare supplement commercial came on. That didn’t help.
NotMax
Long ago came to consider each today a down payment on tomorrow.
dexwood
Thought I’d be dead by 30, but things didn’t work out. Having hit 70 now, the number of friends and family I’ve lost over the last 40 years is sobering. Getting old, sure, but not giving up.
The Moar You Know
@sab: one of my former girlfriends would debate that pretty enthusiastically.
VeniceRiley
@cope: I imagine I will too. I keep reminding myself mom is 99 and dad died at 89. I should be good for a while. Have a friend whose parents died at 40. She didn’t get over getting past that until it happened. She would make me promise to pluck her chin hair before anyone saw and stuff like that.
sab
@The Moar You Know: So my husband is right, as he often is.
Leto
John: I understand where you’re coming from. So much so that you made a front page post about me. You’re in a much better place to be able to live a healthy, productive, long life. You eat pretty well, you get out and about, you’re mentally active, you’re socially active, you recognized the changes you needed to make and did them, so you’re doing most of the things you need to do for us to be able to tell you, “The tree’s too close to the damn house” for a long time to come. But I agree, aging sucks. Just do it gracefully, darling.
cope
@sab: Aubrey Plaza immediately comes to mind.
BC in Illinois
@rivers:
This was the perspective that [slowly] surprised me. I have, in one sense, been thinking about death all my life. Teen-aged cousin and teen-aged classmate, that’s one thing. Classmates going to VIetnam, some not coming back, and knowing (as a Navy Hospital Corpsman) that that could have been me. Even the death of a daughter (2) and two nieces (7, 10). These were personal sorrows, and the effects are still there.
But when my father died, and then, one by one, each of my aunts, uncles, my mother, and finally the last aunt of that generation, age 100 . . . yeah, “the roof has been removed.”
I am surprised that this was the perspective that had the effect that it has. Now we are the older generation. I remember looking up to parents, aunts, uncles. I guess I wasn’t looking forward to people looking up to us.
Jeffery
At age 50 everyone is officially in geriatric medicine. Depending how well you took care of your body depends on how well you will do with the final part of your life. It is pretty much a down hill ride from 50 onwards.
CaseyL
@sab:
@The Moar You Know:
So would Aubrey Plaza :)
Spanky
@The Moar You Know: “And Aubrey Was Her Name” was a bad song by Bread, a bad band.
trollhattan
@Baud:
“Talkin’ ’bout
myyour generation. You kids otta hitch up your pants and get off the phone. No more tattoos, they’re dumb. Go for a walk!”Morzer
@Jeffery:
stamps foot furiously
I REFUSE to be classed as geriatic.
considers going to the doctor because of a mysterious foot pain that developed out of nowhere
Elizabelle
Don’t really feel like talking about this right now. Almost all of us have had the luxury of years. We are, most of us, of the age where the vast number of souls who came before us never made it. All the young people, military and civilians, killed in wars. All the injuries, illnesses, plagues. Childbirth.
It is shocking to encounter the death of those known to us, or beloved to us. (Tom Petty, that was the biggest recent shock.). All the Covid deaths. We were losing more people than a Surfside condo collapse every single day, for a year. Out of sight.
Anyway, heard this song again earlier this summer, and it’s a good one. Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City.”
Video begins with a building demolition. Win. Reminds us of Trump’s casino and its demise.
Leto
@sab: Only Aubrey’s I know are women, with Aubrey Plaza being the most prominent. But I went to school with both Aubrey’s and Audrey’s. All women. I’m going to say that it’s a generational thing, with the way names change. Example off the top of my head: Lindsey. I don’t know any men named Lindsey. Only one I can think of is Lindsey Graham. Same for Leslie. Only Leslies I knew growing up were women. But there’s the immortal Leslie Nielsen. Different time/age and all that.
NotMax
@sab
Sir C. Aubrey Smith, charter member of the Hollywood chapter of the Eyebrows Hall of Fame.
:)
trollhattan
@Mary G:
Hilarious.
Worked with someone who’s dad would bring home rescue birds to rehabilitate, hopefully for release. Some literally lived in the house, her favorites were owls, which she said are utterly silent when they fly past.
What scared her were the herons and egrets, because they could lance the utter hell out of you with those long, pointed beaks. You always had to hold them by the back of the head to prevent that, which I’m guessing is not easy with a full-ass grown heron.
Guessing gulls can peck the bejeezus out of you as well.
Elizabelle
@Leto: Wise words.
I like your last sentence. I hear it with a British accent, somehow. David Bowie’s voice.
Mary G
@sab: Aubrey Huff is a particularly maggoty ex-baseball player who posts particularly idiotic right wing tweets for TFG. TBogg is just insulting him with something that will get on his pseudomacho nerves.
sab
@cope: I stand corrected. I had thought she was an Audrey.
Quiltingfool
@CaseyL: I’m starting to think about family memorabilia too. I’m an only child, and I have no children. All the photos, keepsakes, etc., I wonder who is going to want them? Then again, I think that when I die, I’m really not going to care, lol! I believe I’ll enjoy them now, and those things will go wherever when I’m gone.
sab
@Mary G: T Bogg is an evil genius, which I mean as a compliment.
TeezySkeezy
@Baud: Oh don’t be silly, that’s not gonna happen.
NotMax
@Leto
Also too, Beverly.
namekarB
I used to enjoy going to funerals as it was a chance to catch up with all my old friends, but not very many show up anymore. I don’t know why.
Morzer
@Baud: And there I was relying on you to take over after Ancient Joe Biden’s second term….
CaseyL
@Quiltingfool:
I’m not a solipsist by any means, but I am cultivating a solipsistic attitude towards my own death: From my point of view, the universe ends when I do.
Morzer
@CaseyL:
“I’m not a solipsist by any means”
Me neither. I just think it’s incredibly generous of me to allow the rest of y’all to share the reality I create.
sab
I spent a lot of years doing eldercare for my own parents, and it was often grueling, but also healing and helpful. All families have to work stuff out. And most children blessed with good parents owe some payback for good care.
I love my step kids a lot, but I only met them in their teens. One of my major fears is that they will somehow get stuck with me when I didn’t raise them. My husband smoked for years, and had a tough blue collar job. His family has tended to die early. My family lives long.
Revrick
I’m 72 now. Being a pastor I have always been keenly aware of mortality, having officiated at over 250 funerals since I was ordained in 1975. The youngest was for a preemie who died at two weeks, the oldest a 100 year-old. The hardest were the children/youth. One was one of my daughter’s best friends, who died of neuroblastoma at age 5 on Mother’s Day. Another was my niece killed in an auto accident at age 16. My very first funeral was for a 20 year-old woman who died of stomach cancer. She was an only child and her parents created a shrine for her in their living room. Another 20 year-old young man who died of brain cancer; his dad has never gotten over it. But I shouldn’t be surprised. My paternal grandparents lost their firstborn in 1921 at age 4, and years later, when I asked my grandmother about Faye, she vehemently replied, “I curse God for taking her!”
Of course, all my experience with the dying followed thousands of visits in hospitals, homes and nursing homes with the dying and their loved ones.
In the early 80s I read Philippe Aries’ tome, “The Hour of Our Death,” which traces how attitudes toward death and dying has shifted in Western civilization over the past millennium (he described five distinct attitudes). Death is not just an individual matter. It is one of the two biological wild cards (along with sex) that societies either create helpful rituals around or suffer the consequences.
CaseyL
@Morzer:
Taken a Turing test lately? :D
NotMax
@Morzer
Personal stock response when asked how it feels to become so-called golden yeared, “It’s a carnival of revelations.”
Also inordinately fond of someone else’s quip: “When I wake up in the morning, whatever I have two of – one hurts.”
Miss Bianca
@The Moar You Know:
No, he was not.
Still reeling a bit from the death a month or two back of an ex-bandleader and dear old friend of mine – he was in his 60s, but looked at least a decade younger, moderate drinker, no other drug habits that I was aware of, healthy diet, etc. Cancer of the gall bladder. Ugh, ugh, ugh.
Morzer
@CaseyL: I am a self-driving car and a dessert topping!
Cacti
It’s trendy these days to give infant girls traditionally male names.
In contrast, I don’t see anyone in a hurry to name their newborn son Jennifer.
Morzer
@Cacti: When a tidal wave of boys named Bennifer is unleashed on our innocent community, you know who I am going to blame, don’t you?
Miss Bianca
@Leto: So, Aubrey Plaza is a person, not a place? OK, got it.
Baud
That’s not where we exist, is it?
sab
@Revrick: Thank you. I will try to find that to read.
Karl M Griffin
@John Revolta: George Carlin. The guy who finally explained the 10 commandments.
Honus
@Leto: Lindsey Buckingham. Lindsey Nelson
Cacti
@Morzer: I remember once when I was on my way to a first time meeting with a hetero married couple, whose first names were Shannon and Ashley.
I had to ask a mutual friend who was the husband and who was the wife before we arrived. lol
sab
@Cacti: Like Marion with an “o”. Fine old male southern name now foisted on girls. The girls are (or should be ) Marian.
Also too Alison is a girl’s name. Allison is a surname or possibly a middle name. Learn how to spell, people!
Cheryl from Maryland
@CaseyL: Same here. I’ve been investing time n uploading images and information to Ancestry.com and Findagrave.com. I’ve already found cousins I didn’t even know about thanking me for the images. I like to think after I am gone these items will be able to be shared by the extended family through the Intertubes.
sab
@Honus: Last names as boys first name is an old Irish and Scottish tradition.
evodevo
@Quiltingfool:
And to CaseyL, too…if you have an Ancestry.com membership, you could scan some of the most relevant photos and load them to a family tree – there may be someone out there who is looking for info about those very people. I’ve made the acquaintance of a couple of distant relatives this way, and we both benefited from the info. That way the pics will move on into the future…
Nicole
@sab:
Except, as someone pointed out to me once, all of these names that end in “son” end that way because the name’s origin likely was, “Son of…”
dnfree
When I was in college I went to an off-campus doctor. For some reason the conversation turned to death, and he said “Patients often say to me ‘If I die, I want…’, and I say to them, ‘What do you mean IF you die? It’s WHEN you die.’”
When I was 65, I read an article in the local paper about an elderly woman who had been attacked. She was…65. I didn’t feel elderly, but there I was. Now I’m 75, and I feel elderly.
My husband has lost all four of his siblings. If you came from larger families, as we both did…not having siblings around is unimaginable.
NotMax
@Miss Bianca
Random thought flashed across the internal news ticker as to whether there’s a Rhodes family which named a kid Country.
Actual people have encountered in real life:
Justin Case
Royce Rolls
;)
zhena gogolia
@Mary G:
Same problem here with the photos. My cousin just gave me the most precious picture of my mother and her mother from about 1927, and they’re little girls with perfect flapper hairdos, kind of Louise Brooks. But no one is going to want it when I’m gone.
On the Ron Howard front, it hit me when I looked at a college reunion photo. There was one guy who looked bald and paunchy, and I looked at his name, and although I wasn’t a close friend of his, I just flashed on him with a beautiful face, a thick shock of hair, wearing tight jeans on his narrow hips, and I was just like, OMG, this is horrible! Somehow his physical change hit me harder than my own.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: now wait just a minute—are we allowed to CHANGE song lyrics? Need a ruling from DougJ on this.
zhena gogolia
@Honus:
At least it wasn’t Pat Boone in his bathrobe!
Honus
@NotMax: high school classmates Carmen Harman and Jett Black
zhena gogolia
@sab:
It was a boy’s name when I was a kid, but here you go, Aubrey Plaza:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_Plaza
dnfree
And I’ve got to add Leonard Cohen. The whole song is great, but “I ache in the places where I used to play” is genius
“Well, my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on
I’m just paying my rent every day in the Tower of Song…“
zhena gogolia
@NotMax:
I love him! My husband and I will watch any film he’s in.
I should have read the whole thread to realize that 50 BJers got to Aubrey Plaza before me.
raven
My old man was 81 when he died and I’ll be 72 in November. He ran marathons into his late 70’s and was a stone war horse and time still caught up with him. This back surgery, and the mobility issues that prompted it, have me thinking more about doing as much as I can for as long as I can. A couple of years ago our financial dude said “What are you saving it for? Have some fun”. That’s the name of that tune.
sab
@Cheryl from Maryland: My dad’s only sibling was adopted. My dad adored her. Their mother was horrible and jealous, so there were some issues. I found out in high school that she had never told her kids she was adopted. She died very young ( fifties) and I don’t think her kids had known she was adopted until after she died.
We kind of lost touch after that, and we had assumed that when they found out they lost all interest in family photos. Not so. Some of them are named after relatives they loved and respected. And they still live in the area we have been in for centuries. My sister’s kids all moved out of state. So cousins are rooting through old family pictures with me, and they know more history about them than I do. They were raised in the family in a way that we (out of state) were not. The family is absolutely as much or more theirs than ours, and they want those pictures.
Always check with family before you toss stuff.
Honus
@CaseyL: that’s what Ayn Rand said in an interview I saw. “I won’t die, the world will end”
Kim Walker
Mortality has become a thing for me and possibly my sister and step-siblings. My Dad died at the end of April, and I’m not sure we will get over it. We all agree that Dad was the backstop. Where, in case of emergency, we could go for safety. And we are all in our fifties and early sixties. But the scars of the Reagan recession have really stuck with us. Most of us have a little something put by, whether is it property or proper retirement accounts. But we all still feel, or newly feel, very vulnerable to chance or chicanery. Dad told “I’d beg, borrow or steal for you.” And he was a very good person. He never actually did beg, borrow or steal – he saved – but we appreciated the sentiment and depth of his love and devotion. We miss our Dad.
dnfree
@sab: I acquired a stepmother in my fifties. My dad remarried after my mom died. In spite of getting married in their late 70s, they had 15 years together, 13 of which were pretty good years. After my dad died, I helped care for his wife, along with her children. For one thing, after that long, she was family. And for another thing, I knew that was what my dad wanted.
Honus
@sab: and every Lebanese has a last name that’s a first name. Thomas, George, Joseph…
Spanky
@Miss Bianca: Does Aubrey Plaza have a brother named Rockefeller?
sab
@dnfree: My husband came from a large family, six kids. Two of them died shortly after they turned 70. The others are shell-shocked. They are all friendly people, but their siblings are their world. I cannot imagine.
Spanky
@Cacti:
There are many Chris and Chrises. Why they choose to be known this way escapes me.
Steve in the ATL
@NotMax: actual people I knew as a kid:
Wood Byrnes
Rocky, Wendy, and Sandy Beach
Person I worked with:
April Scheuers
god help us.
TheQuietOne
I was 53 when I checked out on the table being prepped for bypass surgery. I’m 67 now and still think people that do heart surgery are Gods.
raven
@Spanky: I coached a kids hoop team with 6 out of 10 kids named Chris.
Mary G
@raven: That is me right now. Amazon drivers are getting quite a workout from Prime Day and since. Our frying pans were horrible with bad nonstick and loose handles. The old me wouldn’t want to buy new and wait for some to come into the thrift shop. Instead I bought two carbon steel ones that Cole has been raving about. He was right.
raven
@Mary G: I just told the princess that we are going to get a new heat pump for her upstairs studio. She’s been making do with a window unit since the old one gave it up but she spends so much time up there that it’s just not fair.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
It kind of takes one aback to realize he was nearly 40 when the calendar flipped from the 19th to the 20th century.
Richard Guhl
@BC in Illinois: “the roof has been removed”
Having experienced this, two things come to mind:
Honus
If you have friends and family you love, you will lose some of them and it will cause you pain. The alternative is to not have people you love. It’s what Faulkner meant when he said “between grief and nothing, I will take grief”
CaseyL
@Cheryl from Maryland: I’m not the custodian of family photos: my Mom and Aunt are. I’ll pass along the suggestion.
I have a big ol’ folder file full of other types of memorabilia though: my grandmother’s letters from when she and my grandfather traveled to Asia, notebooks full of more notes from more travels. (Kudos to my grandparents: the minute they had the time and enough money, they immediately set off on all the tours and cruises they’d ever wanted to go on. They took tramp steamers; they stayed in inside berths; they traveled cheap but widely.)
The thing is, my grandmother’s writing was/is practically indecipherable.
I could read her writing way back then, more or less; the family joke was that we had to wait until Nanny and Pop-Pop came back so they could read their own letters out loud to us. Trying to read those letters now, it’s mostly figuring out random words and trying to get the meaning from context. If I scanned and uploaded them, I can’t even imagine someone else trying to decipher them!
raven
@Elizabelle: My SIL was at his last show at the Hollywood Bowl.
sab
@dnfree: I love these kids, but I didn’t go throught the sleepless nights of child-rearing. I owed my parents a lot. These kids owe me nothing but affection. I am horrified by the thought that any of them would volunteer to go through the last twenty years I have had with my parents. Psychologically rewarding but finacially really rough. They do not owe me that.
raven
@Honus: And here I sit wondering about another dog. If I got one that lived as long as Bohdi I’d be 88 when he/she went.
sab
@CaseyL: Any secretaries, accountants, bookkeepers or librarians in your family? They can read anything.
raven
Speed on brother, hell’s only half full!
John Cole
@Cacti: they’re only girls names because we decided they were
smintheus
@geg6: Last week I came across the photo of a darling, sweet natured friend from my university and went to look her up. I was shattered to learn she died seven years ago at age 44 from a brain tumor. So young and in such pain. I’m mourning that I wasted the opportunity to keep in touch with her. The lively and beloved person I remembered so vividly has been blown off in a gust, now just a snapshot from an enigmatic lifetime.
These are the losses I care about, the friends who deserved better from life, the people I didn’t really know and appreciate as fully as I knew I should. I don’t think about my own mortality because it won’t matter to me.
JustRuss
My first serious girlfriend just passed away. Cancer. Even though we rarely spoke anymore, it feels like a huge hole has been blown out of the world. She was kind of a force of nature, it’s hard to imagine she’s gone. And yeah, that’s scary.
raven
@smintheus: I was thinking about a guy I went to grad school with. He was a good 20 years younger and, when I googled him last week, he’d gotten some kind of injury and he killed himself. Rocker me some.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a Valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four
Skepticat
No one in my direct lineage of whom I know in the past four generations has lived past 75. I hit that milestone (gateway?) in less than two weeks, though I plan to spin out the skein at least a bit longer than the rest of them. I need to hang on if only to clean up the financial and logistical mess I’d otherwise be leaving a niece and a nephew. Ack.
Ohio Mom
Kim Walker@95:
You have put into words something I have also felt, that my guaranteed soft landing place is gone, and it’s been three decades since my mom died.
Honus
@raven: when we got the two dogs we have now my wife laughed and said “you realize they’ll probably outlive us”
CaseyL
@smintheus:
@JustRuss:
@raven:
Yes. I look up people I used to be close friends with; sometimes I wind up reading their obituaries. It’s always a shock.
OTOH, a person I considered a BFF in high school, who effectively inoculated me against pathological liars and cultists because she was both… I read *her* obituary (died at 40, liver cancer) with great schadenfreude.
Jeffery
@raven: After a lifetime of penny pinching I have loosened the purse strings a bit.
raven
@Honus: I’m sure we’ll do it.
NotMax
@Mary G
If there’s one lesson learned over the years, it’s that when it comes to cookware you get what you pay for.
Yes, there are some manufacturers who trade (or worse, coast) on the brand name to ask a premium price. It’s easy enough to weed them out via cursory research when shopping around. Scored a larger size skillet (which I do have more than occasional or holiday uses for and often lamented not having, the old one having gone to kitchen Valhalla some time back) during Prime Days which thus far has lived up to the rave reviews. It even comes with its own Phillips screwdriver (and not a cheapie dollar store type, either) with which to attach the handle. Also (IMHO) too attractive to hide away in a cabinet.
Steeplejack
Today is Ruckus’s birthday, I believe. (Haven’t read the threads today.)
Baud
@Steeplejack:
I saw him in an earlier thread, but didn’t know it was his birthday.
Layer8Problem
I literally just lost my mom to dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, and the usual old-age stuff about two hours south of Cole on I-79. The way I always thought of it was that your parents are in front of you on the way to the exit door; I’ve got only one left blocking me and my siblings from that.
I’ve got two outstanding little grandkids and a partner whose value is far beyond rubies. I probably have a whole bunch of years left, reasonably good health, and halfway decent knees. We have good friends in our age group and above going full steam ahead. My mom’s passing was expected, we really lost her a few years back, and she could have taken better care of herself. But her being gone still hits hard.
Steeplejack
@Baud:
I’m going by my Balloon Juice Deep State Stasi file.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Heard a rumor he’s retired.
:)
Rusty
Lost my best friend of 45 years this December from cancer. (I’m 55) We had a small high school class, exactly 100 students with 46 guys. Blue collar, lower white collar town. Guessing at least 10 guys are already dead. Suicides, drunk driving crash, alcohol and drug abuse. Bad habits that catch up with you in your 50’s. My college class has a much lower death rate than my high school class, which goes to show wealth and demographics matter. Still, it was really hard losing someone you texted, IM’d or talked to every day. Surprisingly my wife and I still have all our parents but realistically they will all be going relatively soon. I think the moment you realize your the oldest of the family that it really hits (that’s my dad’s opinion).
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Naw, that’s crazy talk. We’d have heard about it if he was.
Chip Daniels
As I’ve aged (now 60) its been odd to watch old TV shows and see myself slowly passing each one of the “old people” I used to watch.
Archie Bunker? Probably only late 40s.
Lou Grant? He was maybe in his fifties.
Every character played by those white haired guys Leslie Nielson, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Dean Martin?
Yep, I’m older.
And its weird, that I don’t feel older. I watch clips of the early sixties Rat Pack (maybe in their 40s?) and they still seem like old farts.
jeffreyw
@CaseyL: I failed a touring test when I didn’t go anywhere.
BRyan
Both my parents are gone. I’m the second oldest of nine siblings, the oldest being 74. It’s ghastly to contemplate the day coming when we’ll begin to make our exits — and in the case of the younger/healthier ones, to imagine being the last ones standing. One benefit we got from the pandemic: the second youngest hosted a zoom call with as many of the sibs as were available every week for 16 months (and counting). In that way, we got to spend more time together than we probably would have under normal circumstances, without covid restrictions. So we were lucky; in that sense, the lockdowns were a blessing. But when the sibs circle is broken … oh, it doesn’t bear thinking about.
Elizabelle
@Rusty: My condolences on the passing of your best friend. Terrible loss.
persistentillusion
@satby: Satby, I completely agree. It’s not just Americans who handle this so poorly, but by God, we’ve raised it to a fine art.
P.S. Got your lovely SL package today. Thanks so much!
smintheus
@raven:
This was grad school for me as well, she was some years younger too. If it had been just a few years later, we all would have had personal emails and the internet and could easily have kept in touch. Instead I’ve spent the decades since in regular contact with huge numbers of people who don’t mean remotely as much to me as several dozen dear and close friends from my grad school days who would be very hard to look up much less reconnect with.
@CaseyL:
Unfortunately the pathological liars who have littered my life are not the ones to die young. Would that it were so.
persistentillusion
@Morzer:
Morzer, I agree. I’m clinging to Late Middle Age with all the strength in my slightly withered fingers.
dnfree
@CaseyL: I scanned my dad’s letters to my mom during World War II (navy, Pacific). I can read about 95% of his handwriting but I know my kids wouldn’t be able to. So I also transcribed them. But I have boxes of letters, and I’m not sure I have the time to do that for all of them.
My mom was a prolific letter-writer, and my grandmother saved her letters that document our childhood. I’d like to preserve them.
persistentillusion
@NotMax:
NotMax, those are some fine attack eyebrows.
lowtechcyclist
My late MIL, who was only ~9 years older than me (I robbed the cradle :-)), used to say, “getting old sucks.” And my answer was always “that’s why I refuse to have anything to do with it.” I’m in my late 60s, and so far I’ve been able to stick to that.
It helps that I’ve got good genes – the youngest of my grandparents to die was 77 when she passed; I had a great-aunt on my mom’s side who lived to 100, and a great-uncle on my dad’s side who came within a couple months of that number. My dad made it to 90 before Parkinson’s brought him down, and my mom’s still alive at 94, but she’s deep into dementia now.
I worry about the possibility of dementia, but other than my mom, nobody in my family’s been afflicted by it, going back a few generations. So I’m hoping that I dodge that bullet. I’m retiring at the end of 2023, and I have a ton of hikes and bike rides I want to do once my days are all free. Hopefully leading the physically active life I’ve lived, and plan to continue to live, will keep me going for a long time yet.
Steve in the ATL
@dnfree:
Similarly, I keep a pdf file of my balloon Juice posts for my eventual grandkids
persistentillusion
@NotMax: Nova Lush, Lotis Blotus, Candy Barr. I used to collect the more egregious examples.
debbie
@Steeplejack:
Can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but he is. Unless he changed his mind.
dww44
@Leto: I had an Uncle named Aubrey although I was grown before I knew that. Everyone, including his parents, called him “Auby..”
zhena gogolia
@debbie:
He’s joking. It’s been a running gag that ruckus mentions his retirement in every comment.
Steeplejack
@debbie:
I was joking! He retired on June 17.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
Thank you!
Soprano2
My father died of a massive heart attack when I was 21 and he was 48; that taught me that there is a way out of grief, which was a lesson that came in handy when my only sister was killed in a small plane crash at the age of 46. I was 51 when that happened, and it made me aware in a way I hadn’t been before how fragile and unpredictable life is, and that there are no guarantees. I thought we would live together in our old age as two crazy cat ladies, but now that will never happen. My mom is 87, and my husband is 14 years older than me, so I fully expect to live my last years alone. It terrifies me sometimes. My mother was an only child, so I have no idea what I’ll do with all the stuff she got from her parents.
wmd
When I had cancer in 2017 (I was 56 years old) it caused a lot of introspection. My plans for travel and enjoying life had been present, but now they are priorities. My treatment was successful and I’ve had no evidence of disease at all the subsequent surveillance visits.
The past year of course made travel a foolish choice, but now I’m fully vaccinated and feel comfortable traveling again.
satby
@persistentillusion: ?
PaulWartenberg
the guy who owned the comic book store I went to in Bartow passed away this Sunday.
he’d been fighting leukemia the last two years, and the treatments just never worked out for him.
he was about the same age as me. had a family, except for a daughter who died in her sleep – I never found out what happened to her – a few years ago.
really tragic stuff. :(
OldDave
I find the interesting threads here only after they are overtaken by their younger siblings. On aging, all I can say is try to see the humor. I’m 68, but tell everyone I’m 44 (which is true if you use hexadecimal notation). Both my parents are gone – my mother first after a long battle with heart failure, my father a few years later, suddenly, when a drug addict thought robbery and murder was an acceptable way of scoring money. And more recently I lost my mother-in-law to Covid. All of this to say, yeah, I think of mortality – mine and others – nearly daily. Speaking of which – RIP to Charlie Robinson, “Mac” on Night Count, at 75 – an age that used to seem so very far away, but no longer does.
The Mugster
If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.
N M
@persistentillusion:
Knew a Misty Mountain, she had a brother named Rocky. Fun gal, great sense of humor.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
@Steeplejack:
Thanks, and sorry.
Art
At over 60 I”m starting to wonder what all the fuss is about. Pain and suffering are worrying, but it’s mainly disability that scares me. I like relative autonomy. Being able to drive … how the hell can anyone get along without driving? Not being able to feed myself. Or make it to the toilet. Worse still, a swift mind trapped in a useless body and totally dependent.
Death, on the other hand, seems as much a solution as a problem. I suspect that once we die … nothing. I’ll miss my friends, and dogs, and spending time looking at the sky. But bug bites, and assholes, and bureaucratic complications far, far less. Time free of suffering and worry. A time to rest. Even if I’m not there to experience it. That doesn’t sound so bad.
It also provides a sort of safety rail. I can be beaten and tortured. I suffer. But all these things stop for me when I die. Good news is that I don’t take Hell seriously. Infinite pain for eternity isn’t in the cards. Somewhat comforting that.
Ohio Mom
Art:
My belief system is pretty much yours — all the regret and missing things is now, not after death.
The really old people I’ve known, friends and relatives in their late eighties and into their nineties, all were much more at peace with the idea their time was almost over than relative young ones like us. I expect the same, that I will grow into the idea of being ended as I continue to age.
Art
@Ohio Mom: Every story needs an ending.
I find that time keeps going faster. I enjoy naps more as I age. The fact that one day I’ll lay down and be free of all burdens, all worries, all suffering kind of sounds nice.
That I avoid both eternal boredom with a harp, and the whole ‘lake of fire’ routine, and that the scolds, moralizers, and Bible thumpers can’t do a damn thing about it, pleases me.
Panurge
@sab: “Aubrey” is both so scarcely used these days and so similar to “Audrey” that GenX and beyond have come to assume that it’s a girl’s name.