Reaper

It's way past my bedtime as I sit here writing this post. We're having a majestic thunderstorm--pouring down rain, flashes of lightning, and loud rolling thunder. Since I can't get to sleep anyway, I'll pour a glass of the grape and do this...........

A special friend of one of the kids lost their father recently. This event has shaken up some personalities I thought were pretty stable and had the proverbial "it" together. Others in this group are watching disease and age perform its, to their minds, malicious work.

Now I've made light of death in this blog and been serious about loss as well . But the loss of a parent---------maybe we don't think of it often enough. My mother succumbed to lung cancer the summer after my senior year in high school, about two weeks before I left for college. Her illness put a definite chill in what should have been a triumphal year. My father died in the mid-90s. My maternal aunts were still alive so I was insulated from death being close in my future---so I believe one might think---those "old" people are in the front line, I'm ok on the bench behind them.

Last November the last of my mother's sisters died. Now my generation--my brother, two first cousins, me----we're the oldest generation, the front line if you will. Actually, just to highlight the absurdity, one of my first cousins has a daughter two months older than me even though I'm a generation ahead of her. And all things being equal, shouldn't the ole Reaper take the oldest generation first, in the natural order of things-----excepting man-made unnatural ends caused by cigarettes, car crashes, war, and those other human calamities that so rob us of our "best and brightest"............

So a parent's death puts one closer to that first line of humanity's defense against the irresistible power of the Grim Reaper. As long as that buffer generation is there, death is a long way off, not to be feared or even much contemplated. But it's still there, lurking, moving forward in the queue of thoughts our conscious mind ponders.

I'm reminded of the Star Trek movies, numbers two and three, when Captain James Tiberius Kirk (all my kids know his middle name) experiences the death of his best friend, Spock, and his son, David. Kirk always "cheated death", never "faced it like this." So like the attitude of the generation with parents or aunts and uncles preceding them. Don't need to confront the concept until you are the front line generation, when there are no more planted rows between you and the ultimate harvest.

I don't know if this post provides any comfort for the loss experienced. I guess one could always turn to Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper." I'm sure some might seek solace in the Bible. Some might believe in re-incarnation (a Yankee fan finding Nirvana coming back as a Red Sox fan---sorry,fp). But I think the important lesson is that while you have life, enjoy it and live it. Celebrate the dead, the body is gone but the spirit joins eternity and will always BE.