Two Funerals and a wondering

To be honest it’s been a few funerals,  but specifically I’m thrown off by axis by one of which was this week, the other from 1988.

This week the funeral of a friend, Des Tierney, a good bastard by any measure. If I end up half a good a bastard then I’ll be spectacular. No one exemplified the meaning of community than Des. There won’t be a million words or books written about Des, and that’s a pity in some regards, but he’ll be an oral legend, around these and other parts.

The other funeral, my Father. The one I didn’t go to because I just moved to New Zealand, in 1987.

The thing that links them? Well in the sadness of things they both died before they were 60.

And why then would I be thrown into the funk that I have. Well I’m not getting any younger, and I’m now contemplating, as I did with some incredulity at 16, as being as old as my dad. Except now that the words “when he died” are added on the end.

So why should I panic about the age my father died? He was a heavy smoker with a sedentary lifestyle, it’s not the way I am. And how does the passing of a friend conflate a story to make it a doom.

In a normal thinking they don’t. But as your own mortality, and your own perception of that mortality changes you begin to fret. I spoke to a couple of of me friends about this, and they get it, what I’m feeling, they didn’t laugh, they just compared theirs to mine, and we all agreed that it was a nothing. It is what it is, there is no binary thing going on, that event A does not meant that it will equal a similar event  A for me, or them.

So now here I am wondering why it is that I never owned a Lotus Elite Turbo, and E-Type Jaguar. A 1967 Mustang fastback , or a V8 anything, and it’s not like that would define me in anyway. It might bring me immediate pleasure, and the added angst of maintaining and paying for it.

I’m now wondering why I never went home to England and abandoned almost everything to a new country, like no one ever did that, but I’ve not been home, not am I likely to go home, and I left in 1987. And yes it’s still home. Go figure.

Do I think people will tell grand stories about me when I die? You’re having a laugh, the most heroic I’ve been was when never.  Should I worry about that?

So a life just as ordinary. A fear and doubt. A surprise? There are many things in my head, and a weight on my shoulder that has descended for no reason other than self.

But if I had a motto to live by it would be “this too shall pass”, and it will. Might get that as a tattoo.

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