Yeah I do stuff and I need to prove it to myself
I keep my funeral cards on my fridge to keep those who are gone in my memory. I’m lucky that I only have two of them - I’m sure that at some point in my life I won’t be able to fit them all on my fridge.
My grandfather on my birthday delivered to me a poetic speech. He described going metal detecting outside his house with my uncle (who is now passed) and finding coins and cans in a recessed area. He told me about how he imagined that there was once a pond there where people went swimming and had fun - but as seasons and years came and went, the pond was filled with leaves, which eventually turned to soil, and now when they were up there, there was barely a trace of the joy that used to be there and no one is alive anymore who remembers.
He is 90-something, and so I don’t blame him for getting down about having to see almost everyone and everything he’s ever loved disappear or change, but it did give me a little bit of a crisis on my birthday. Not that I wasn’t already thinking about it.
Yesterday my funeral cards fell down and I realized I hadn’t actually done the math of how old my grandmother and uncle were when they died. My grandmother was in her mid-70s, and my uncle was in his mid-60s. That’s not really that old - if I live as long as my uncle that would mean that my life is almost half over, and what do I really have to show for it.
Of course I am lucky to have met many people, achieved academic success, felt an array of emotions, been a lot of places, done a lot of things - but somehow it feels like I’ve been waiting for something all this time. In elementary school I was waiting for the summertime, in high school I was waiting for college, in college I was waiting for the rest of my life to start, in Boston I was waiting for New York.
And now that I’m here I’m waiting for the answer to come to me for how I’m going to spend the back half of my life. I wrote about this before about how I can’t achieve something and relax, I have to move on to the next thing - and I’ve been debating whether I have it in me to allow myself to have fun on the journey of discovering what’s next.