In Letters Unread
I was going through my professional e-mail account (the one I use when volunteering and order stuff online) reading through mail I hadn't opened in months. I get bad about that sort of thing when I get busy. I just open what looks important and neglect the rest.
Well you can imagine my surprise when I got to an e-mail sent at the end of August informing me that one of the long-time twirlers from the Gay marching band I volunteered with early this summer had passed away. They didn't give the causes but I have my own suspicions on what they were. It's odd, because over the summer when I was around this guy at practices I had an unpleasant nagging feeling that he was sick. There were several times he didn't show up for rehearsals. It makes me wonder now if the two weren't connected.
I find this situation deeply troubling. This is the second social acquaintance I have known who has died in the past year. It has given me shake and reminded me once again just how fleeting life is. People really can die at any moment. And while this man wasn't a close friend of mine (we had a few passing words here and there) he was the close friend of someone else. And maybe that person didn't get the chance to say some last important thing or even see him before he died. It made me think about my own life and my own friends, especially those whom I have not kept in as great contact with.
Life has its ways of slowing you down and grounding you. We get so wrapped up in our own lives that it is easy to forget about someone else's. It's not so easy anymore to keep in contact with people. Everyone else is running around and trying to stay afloat. We have more technology and in some cases greater connectivity but in many ways more disconnectedness.
All I can do in the face of such a sobering situation is to try and reevaluate all that I have been doing and to try and take a moment to connect with everyone important in my life. That is a hard task to achieve at times but at least I will have the comfort of knowing I did all that I could should the unthinkable happen. If you have friends or relatives whom you've grown distant with lately I encourage you to try and make a connection. You never know when they may be gone.
