Thinking about death in the New Year

New Year's Day. Fresh start, new beginning, ... all that stuff. And it finds me kind of quiet.

Back when I was a kid, our ritual for New Year's Day was invariable. We always drove out to the house of my mother's uncle, where my grandparents and other assorted family would all gather, and we'd have a great big buffet around noon. (Why his house? I guess we always went there because we always went there.) Everyone would watch the Rose Parade on television, and then in the afternoon it would be the Rose Bowl game. Some time in the mid- to late afternoon, my parents would gather up me and my brother, and we'd drive back to our own town, heading for the house of my parents' oldest friends there. They, in turn, had their big New Year's party in the evening, so once again we'd all eat too much and the adults would sit around talking for hours afterwards. Their house was better for kids to play in, though, so all the kids of all the families there would run around until we got tired and then fall asleep anywhere it was convenient. Finally we'd get picked up and dropped in the car, and wake up at home the next morning. 

That was a long time ago. Most of those people must be dead by now: certainly my grandparents and my great-uncle are long-since dead, and the next generation of the family have mostly moved out-of-state. My dad is gone, though my mother is still alive.  As for my parents' friends -- I have no idea what's become of most of them. As for the couple that hosted the evening party -- well she died many years ago. He may still be alive -- he was, the last I heard -- but they moved out-of-state many years ago, back when she was still alive. Probably the same pattern follows the rest of that generation, though I never really knew any of the rest of them. It's likely that many of the kids I played with are still alive, but I haven't kept in touch with any of them. All we really ever had in common was that our parents were friends.

So here it is New Year's, and I'm thinking about death.

I guess that's for another reason, too. Yesterday I got a phone call from a friend I used to know in college, and whom I lost touch with shortly after that. I'll be talking about him for a couple of posts at least, because there are a couple of different points from his phone call that I want to discuss, so I had better give him a name. Let me call him Cassius, remembering the line that William Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Julius Caesar: "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous." My friend Cassius always looked lean and hungry, and he thought a lot -- usually in scornful and acerbic tones. So it's not a bad choice. (Cassius has shown up in only one earlier post -- this one here -- where I called him "A." He was romantically involved with Scarlett for a while.)

Anyway, Cassius telephoned me out of the blue -- as I said, we hadn't spoken in something like 37 years -- to tell me that another common friend had died. This other friend (I'll call him K because it's very unlikely I'll ever need to discuss him again) was about our age. Cassius tells me that K was very healthy; specifically, he said, "K was a lot less likely ever to have heart trouble than I am." But K had a massive heart attack in early December and died four days later.

I talked with Debbie on the phone this afternoon, and said I guess I'm starting to get to the age where I can no longer be shocked if one of my contemporaries dies. At first Debbie didn't want to hear this, because she's seven years older than I am. But I'm sixty now. When I learned that Lisa had died back in 2014 (and I learned it a year later), it really startled me. That seemed too young for anyone my age to die, unless it was in a freak accident. But then a year ago it was Fillette. Now it's K. And if someone dies in their sixties, maybe that seems a little on the young side but it's not crazy. It's not bizarre. You don't expect people in their sixties to be dropping like flies yet, but nobody will be stunned.

So what does this tell me?

It seems to me that some time ago, I settled in my mind -- without ever really consciously deciding it -- that if I ever knew I had only a short time to live I would quit my job, stop whatever other things I was doing, and write down all the ideas that have been stewing in my head for so many years. Over the last year, now that I have been thrown out of work, you have heard me mull whether this is now the time for doing exactly that -- without, let me hasten to add, any sign of actual productivity on my part. I think this answers that question. Forget my increasingly feeble attempts to land a job. Sit my ass in the chair and start writing. Maybe I can work towards that in a fragmentary way by posting bits and bobs on the Patio. We'll see.

I may regret this decision if I live to be very old and outlive all my resources. But at least I will have my ideas out of my head and into some other medium. If they all turn out to be stupid ideas, at least I will have helped them into the air. Socrates always told people he was the son of a midwife, too.

Oh ... in case I had no other reasons for thinking about death? Betty White died yesterday as well. Damn, I was starting to think she was immortal. Guess not.