Ruminations on death and dying and grief from a former spooky kid and current hospice volunteer
I took a month to write this. I think the worst thing about the pandemic is the sort of fog that wraps around each memory as time stretched out and lost meaning over the course of a year. Separated from places and people which would otherwise fill in the missing details, memory takes a sort of two-dimensional shape until I'm repeating stories to myself like a mantra. I wonder what I'm getting wrong, or lost. Memories seem sort of warped, like staring down through a muddy lake becoming lost in a haze the deeper down you go. Death isn't an emergency, I know I have all the time in the world now, but it sure as hell feels like it in the moment when you first learn. Need to save and document what now seems like insufficient memorabilia before losing track of it. I know all these things about what's normal to feel and have an entire network of similarly positioned friends and acquaintances. It feels crass to be so well informed and mentally resilient on the topic of death i...