One of the last texts he sent me a few months ago read “miss you girl”. I smiled as I am long past my girly days, but in the palaces of his mind I was still the 20 something girl that once loved him. I didn’t know what to say to his text. Our story was decades ago, my life has been good since then and I couldn’t say I missed him in any particular way. I decided to answer that it was such a nice thing to say. It is nice to know someone is thinking about you and holds your memory dear. Not anymore as I’ve just learned he died two days ago. The fondness for me this man still carried is gone now. So are all his memories of our time together. The girl only he knew dies with him. I will still carry the memory of the man he was with me. For a while. It is a precious memory for me as he was one of the men that never hurt me or tried to take advantage of me in any way, and those are a rare breed.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of carrying the memory of people who are gone, friends, family, people that touched your life in some way. As I grow older the list of people whose memory I carry grows longer. While they’re still remembered, they’re not really dead, are they? It’s a responsibility you have, remembering faces, moments of joy or sadness you shared, laughs, quirks, the people they were. Especially those who are not survived by anyone, those who slipped away alone and barely noticed. As long as you live someone remembers that they once lived.
It’s sad to think of all the pieces of you that die when someone close passes. There’s no one left to remember my weight as I lay against my mother’s breast. Barely anyone to remember my childhood. There are no witnesses left for various parts of my life. I am slipping away.
The time you got to spend with someone becomes more precious when the smell of death is in the air. Carrion eaters have been hovering over our family this year. They got a juicy morsel a few months back and now they circle at a distance, biding their time till they can sink their claws and beaks in what they see as their rightful prey. How long before another of us becomes a memory?
As I sat down to dump my sadness on the blockchain I realized I knew something was wrong with my friend. I’ve been through a lot lately and looking up a friend from 30 years ago was the farthest on my mind. Yet, maybe a week or two ago I checked his Facebook as some part of me had noticed he hadn’t been posting in a while. That part of me was my intuition, a trait that I’ve noticed is getting stronger lately, which is amazing, but also scary. Intuition works on a subconscious level, processing clues and information before the conscious mind gets aware of them. What we call gut feeling or instinct, as in a mother’s instinct, is mainly intuition. Things you cannot explain or want to share when you get a bad feeling. Right now, many in my family are clinging to hope, pray or wait for a miracle that might stave off the scavengers. I keep my mouth shut.
Since my friend who just died was a great Rolling Stones fan I will close this lament with a classic piece that was on the tape he made for me all those years ago.
