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Death

Life

Tempus Fugit

“Time flies.” It’s an observation old enough that we have record of Virgil using it. Time does indeed fly. It flies past and is gone, irretrievably, to the past. I’m feeling a little melancholy today. Today is the 17th anniversary of my sister’s death. And it feels especially poignant to me because this year the 23rd fell on a Friday, just like it did in 2009, when she died. Seventeen years. She was six weeks shy of her 19th birthday. So next year will be the last anniversary of her death before she will have been dead longer than she was a live. That is a really strange thing to think about and hard to wrap my brain around.

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Life

Death with Dignity

In just over a year, my mother-in-law has lost both of her parents. They were wonderful people and we all miss them. My wife’s grandfather died first, last year, not long after the lockdown started. It was sudden, but not a surprise either. He’d been declining steadily over the past few years. He fell at home and just never recovered. After he passed, my wife’s grandma moved up and lived about 20 feet away from my in-laws. She seemed to be doing very well for a little while, apart from the deep sadness of losing her husband of over 50 years.

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Life Musings

Live-Tweeting Despair

Yesterday I watched a man live-tweet the death of his six-year-old daughter. It was horrific. Not because he was tweeting it, he was crying out in pain. It was horrific to watch it unfold. She had cancer and he knew it was coming. He held her as she lay unconscious fighting for the last bits of life she had left. She was my daughter’s age. She died on her birthday.

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