My first cousin once removed died on Wednesday. He is my father’s cousin. He was only 59 years old. He died of an extremely rare brain disease that has an occurance of less than 1 in a million. There have only been a handful of cases ever confirmed in Allegheny County. The last one was in 1996.
He fell ill in January and died this week. It is unbelievable how quickly he disintegrated. That is the best way I can put it. He just disintegrated. He had a full and rich life, and had been retired for two years. He leaves a wife and two sons around my age. They will be taken care of financially, and the sons are good sons who can financially support themselves and emotionally support their mother.
But still, the whole mortality and futility of life is really bothering me. This guy is close to my own father’s age. I saw this guy at Christmas when we were drinking and joking together. I basically grew up with this family.
I had two grandfathers die within a year, about three years ago. Both deaths effected me more than I thought that they would. Both illnesses were relatively quick in that I got to say goodbye, but not much else. Both had long, full, and rich lives full of people and love.
Also, I just found out that the boyfriend of a girl that works in another office in this same building died yesterday of an aneurism. He was a production floor worker in a plastics plant. He was walking across the floor and just fell over. He was dead before he hit the ground. Minutes earlier he had just text messaged his girlfriend’s cellphone telling her to have a good day. He was 31 years old. She was excorted out of this building with a counselor.
You know, what’s use? Eh? Someone want to tell me that? Rush rush rush. Make money. Pay bills. Die.
My wife and I are barely scraping by with money. My life insurance is in full effect in case anything happens to me. We have no credit card debt, but we just bought a house and are dealing with financial ripples that go along with that. At the end of the month our bank account has 25 dollars in it.
I have other things that are bothering me, but they are all tied into this either directly or indirectly.
Yes, I could have a stroke tomorrow, or get hit by a bus. But I’ve had friends and loves and fun. I like to think that if I were to die soon, people would be better off because I’d been here, for how ever long. From your quotes, it sounds like you are the same way.
Take the time to mourn the passing of a person you cared for. It’s part of the process of caring. Then celebrate the fact that they were and always will be part of your life.
Hopefully between the rush rush rush and the die, you grow, live, love, experience, learn, share, enrich, enjoy.
I used to wonder too… What’s the point of it all?
Then I figured out I didn’t care. As long as I enjoy the process, who cares what the end result is? Definitely a case of the journey being bigger than the destination.
I mean, my life isn’t all peaches and roses, not by a long shot. Plenty of things I hope to change/improve. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world and I wouldn’t miss a minute of it. Good, bad or indifferent.
I figure, if I make one person smile, ever, then I’ve accomplished something great
All of the points above are valid, but are contradictory to my emotions. Of course, emotions tend to contradict logic. So, maybe I’m backwards, but I feel more sad when an old accomplished person dies than I do when, say, an innocent child dies.
It might have to do with my lack of religious beliefs, as if the death of the older person signifies the end of an era, while the innocent child was, well, innocent.
Sorry to hear about these sad situations. It’s understandable that you would be feeling depressed after such tragic losses. Perhaps after you’ve had some time to recover you should think about what you can change about your life to give you some new goals to work towards in life besides just going to work every day.
Nothing lasts? Well, the way I look at it, one way that we can all achieve immortality is by passing something on to the next generation - which isn’t to say you need to have offspring of your own. You might want to consider volunteering to be a mentor or “Big Brother” for a younger person, if you don’t mind being around kids. Just an idea!
