So, I’ve recently turned another year older. I won’t say how old. I’ll just say that the phrase “older than dirt’ now applies to me.
I lost a lot of people I cared for over the past three or four months. I guess that’s what happens when you live longer than you thought you would. Those people were a major part of my youth – my childhood and my young adulthood. It’s hard to see them go for a lot of reasons. One of the most difficult for me is that they take my memories with them.
I no longer have them to share memories of when we were 5 or 10 or 20 or 30. When I can’t remember the details, I can’t turn to them to push my memory over the edge to the answer. There are some people gone who were the only people who shared some very specific memories with me, whether it was being young and stoned in Utqiagvik or young and eating popsicles together in my dad’s grocery store.
I don’t know why but I always thought (hoped) I’d go first. I didn’t. And now I have to live with so many memories that no one else shares with me. And that is the loneliest feeling in the world.