Ever wonder how easy it is to be unsettled by a phone call? Take the one I got today from an old acquaintance. Haven't heard from her in a year or two. She wanted to know how I've been feeling. Before I could answer, she told me she had been reading the obituaries lately and so darn many people she used to know have died.
Well, not me, I started to say. She interrupted to tell me she'd been going through her address book, astonished at all the people who wouldn't be answering their phones any more. She meant, not on this planet anyway.
It's not that she really unsettled me. But I'd been thinking lately how strong I've been getting thanks to water aerobics and to my very own personal training. Hey, I'm doing all kinds of things on machines I manage to maneuver in and out of without falling off a seat. Not only that, my OPT aka own personal training is sneaking on heavier weights on these monstrous apparatuses and I'm barely breaking a sweat. Well, almost.
Anyway, after more chit chatting, me chitting and her chatting, I convinced her I was worth a spot in her address book, at least until the next purge. I might have even let her feel my sprouting muscle if we were face to face and not phone to phone.
But the phone call forced me to recognize my own daily cruise through the obituaries. The faces look so pleasant, descriptions sound so neat. Every once in a while I see a person that makes me wistful, feeling like maybe it would have nice to know him or her. Some obituaries are so long, they even have two picture of the person, like in a before and after ad. You might think, who knew that guy was such a stud muffin in his youth. But I digress.
Lately, I've been surfing the pages more intently because a friend died last month and I keep watching for his obituary. He was actually a special friend of my oldest and dearest friend, and she has been obituary screening daily as well. I know she is holding on to her grieving as though she can't let go until his face appears on that dreaded page. Then it will be real. It's not as if we don't understand that he is gone. It is just hard to believe. Understanding and believing are not always compatible.
I said goodby to this special friend of my dearest friend just three days before he died. He was in a recliner, wearing a robe, his voice soft, his toes bare. I mentioned, appropos of nothing, that when I was 76 last year I would launch into an off key version of 76 Trombones, whereupon he told me the origin of that song and about John Philip Sousa, the musician. Ever the scholarly musician himself, he was still able to impart tidbits of information.
When I bid him farewell that last day, I said with a wave, "I'll see you on the other side." He smile, nodded and said 'yes.'
So we wait to read what will be said about him in his obituary. It won't do him justice. I would have written that he was a gentleman in the true sense of the word, a gentle man. I hope we'll see it soon, so my dear heartbroken friend, can begin to heal her splintered heart.
So Says Sassy