Seems to me

It seems to me that life is too short, that friends don't live as long as we need them to and that our landscape is ever changing and it's annoying the crap out of me.

Last weekend I attended the memorial service of a friend who has been a part of my life since I was born. He was elderly, and frail and tired, yet his passing was just as difficult for me as if he had been 30 and had the whole world ahead of him. He was a part of MY landscape...MY life, and he's gone. Things don't seem quite the same to me. It's almost as if my life were haunted by this loss...and that everything I look at seems slightly altered in the most impossible ways.

Just a week later, another friend, yes...elderly and ill, has passed from this world and again I feel this loss as much as I would any other. He wasn't old to me. He was just Stanley. No number or ranking attached. Just Stanley...and he was a great guy, always there when you needed him. He was a rock for my mother, a true friend when she needed one, and for that I will be eternally grateful to him for his calming and strong presence in our lives. Again, things don't seem quite right to me. My landscape is altering, yet again, and I am powerless to stop it. I am haunted by these changes, both emotional and physical. I am helpless in the swirling waters of my life. That's how it feels. Even if I'm NOT technically helpless, it feels that way. I wish it didn't.

How do we learn to cope with these inevitable changes? Do we ever adjust to it? Do we ever come to expect it or like children, do we hold this secret hope that someone...just one person that we know...will not leave us...that they will be forever? I tend to think that realistically we realize what is unavoidable, yet we choose to put blinders on and just live our lives because if we didn't...if we remained conscious of the changes that will surely come, we would never be able to say goodbye, even if just for a moment because we would be too frightened of what might happen in our absence. We could never be casual again. We would live on guard, and that might not be living at all.

So, here I sit, watching my landscape shift...feeling a bit lost and small and wishing my friends a happy journey into the next world. What more can I possibly do?