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Peninsula Daily News Port Angeles, Washington Copyright 2000 Eric Rush www.ericrush.com |
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There were 22 of us, first cousins on both my mother’s and my father’s side. Nearly all of us are in our 50s now. The youngest is, I think, past 40. I am the second-oldest. We are too large a group, too close together in age, to expect death to takes us in order of birth. But we are too young to be thinking about our generation’s deaths at all. In a group this large, perhaps what should be surprising is than neither accident nor childhood illness has killed any of us. What health problems any of us have are, in this age of modern medicine and at our relatively young age, little more than inconvenience. So it was unexpected that one of the younger cousins was the first to die, and die from a common disease. Most of the parents of the 22 of us are in their 80s now, more than half of them still alive. But all of their parents are long gone, and there is no avoiding or denying that our parents are next in line. It is said that the one thing that separates human beings from other living things is our foreknowledge of death. That is both a curse and a blessing, but it forces on us, with respect to those of our parents’ generation, the knowledge of the inevitability of death that softens the sorrow when one of them passes on. We know that is their turn to go, just as it will be ours when we are their age. But it is not yet our turn! It isn’t yet time to die for those of our generation that has not seen the birth of more than a very few of its grandchildren. On average, we 22 are too young to die, but averages are determined by extremes. Of the 22 of us, probably more than one of us will live a full century, far longer than the average. To balance that, probably more than one of us will die young to confirm the average. Probably more than one, but it is this first one that brought most of the rest of us-nearly all of us from my mother’s side of the family and even a few from my father’s side-to a city unfamiliar to all of us except to the one who lived and died there. She is younger in my mind than she was when cancer killed her, but I hadn’t seen her in nearly 20 years. We’d write at Christmas and occasionally bat email back and forth. We tried to get together for dinner a time or two when I happened to be on layover in the city where she lived and worked, but our schedules never quite meshed. We are told these days that cancer is not necessarily a death sentence. That is both a good and a bad point of view. It is good because it is true, but it is bad because it makes denial easier. It makes it easier to avoid confronting the disease, to avoid having to look into a cousin’s eyes and pretending that she will be one of the ones who will win the battle with that which is killing her. So I didn’t take time-didn’t make time-to travel the few hundred miles to visit until after. After vacation. After hunting seasons. After the holidays. After she was dead. It’s too early to know this, but I think we will all look at each other a little differently now. Instead of seeing each other as the children we were, perhaps we’ll look more intently, look to see who we are in this moment instead of merely looking to recognize from memory who we are talking to. Perhaps we’ll see each other as we are, no longer children with unwrinkled smiles and unclouded eyes, but as adults past our physical prime, moving steadily in our turns to the inevitable. I think we’ll appreciate each other more, appreciate ourselves more, take time-make time-to visit each other before, and not wait until before becomes after. |