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Neal Willard
Steve thank you for the perfect sentiment about Chris. You are not alone in the way we all are beginning to feel as we realize “it is true that if we live long enough life has a way on presenting the inevitable. That being the inevitability of the loss of the people who mean so much to us; the inevitable diminishing of our personal worlds that once were.
In the last several years many of our old friends have passed on. Although their passing may not have been entirely unexpected, we still hold to our hope, don't we? Let’ face it, we can't help ourselves.
Nevertheless, when hope is shattered, we are left to mourn. Each in our own way. Even before we were old many of us have had to say goodbye to too many friends. Through those years and sadness, perhaps we might have noticed a strange and wonderful thing in regard to those old friends when they died. Although we may not have visited each other in a long while, or for some since our school day, does it not continue to feel they are still there?
When Lord Byron wrote in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:
What is the worst of woes that wait on age?
What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow?
To view each loved one blotted from life's page,
And be alone on earth, as I am now.
We may know perfectly well our friends are gone, that another piece of our life has gone permanently missing, but fortunately our memories of them and old times remain. The sadness in losing old friends is that there is now much less of the memories created together and we can no longer say, “Remember when we...” and laugh or, sometimes, cry together.
That is gone now. We may question, “is there any point in trying to tell someone else about what happened back then.” Those are the special memories in which you had to be there. Will we now wonder, when we are the only one left to recall those memories if they really happened? Now that is an existential indulgence we should now try to avoid.
So, as we trudge forward, wading through our sadness one more time knowing it will not be the last and that we are a little bit more alone in the world than we were just a few months ago. Let us not say of Chris and our other classmates and friends as most people almost always say, “we loved them so much,” “ we remember when” or “How can that be,” spoken in the past tense? Do not we still love them all? Do not we still remember them all? They and their memory, that is the part of our life that never ends.
Reach out to that old friend, classmate or family member and start remembering now before it is too late.
Mike our prayers are with you.
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