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FINALLY WHAT?

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When I saw “final” as the word of the day, I got a chill. In the past two weeks, I have lost at least three friends with more on the way. Not to mention that my email is full of warnings of: “This is the final hour! Send $3 now!”

Courtesy of Evil Squirrel, here’s the song that rocks it.

I fondly hope this isn’t the final hour for all of us, but it has recently been the final hour for more than a few friends and loved ones.  I don’t know how many more are on the special waiting line. I’m hoping that Death is like the guy in Terry Pratchett’s books. Pragmatic, friendly and most of the time, there to give you a hand to find your right place.

It is a strange feeling watching your friends grow smaller. My mother told me a long time ago that “You know you are officially old when you start to lose your friends.” I thought it was the creepiest thing she ever said. Later, I read versions of the same concept in various books. Mostly memoirs by “famous people.” Which is when I thought “There is nothing to prevent that final loss. No money, power, or fame can change it in any way.” It’s not that I thought money, power, or fame would stop the progression of life toward its ending, but I hadn’t given it much thought. That’s probably why I wonder how come the very richest people in the world are so obsessed with getting more and more money. What are they going to do with it anyway?

Many of these super rich folks already have more money than they could ever spend in a lifetime. Two or three lifetimes. So why is accumulating endless more so urgent that they will rob the poorest? I do not understand it and I hope I never will.

 I get notes from friends about their husbands, mothers, fathers, friends. From the family of friends. Others we know are sick and getting sicker. There won’t be an end to this. Someday, I suppose I’ll be the note in someone’s inbox. I hope it will be a generous and kindly note that skips over my failures and all those times I’ve been an asshole. Try to remember the laughter and humor. It’s the part at which I worked the hardest.

After all these years, I still don’t know how I feel about this ongoing march to a final hour, whether the end of the world or the end of me, but it is the way the world rolls. From opening day to final curtain, the play goes on.

Are we looking at the final days of the earth? Final years of democracy? Final end to everything in which I believed? Or just the inevitable shearing off of living people whose time is done?

If this is final, what does that mean? The final what?

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Categories: Books, Death and Dying, Life, lyrics, Music

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8 replies

  1. jcalberta
    05/16/2017 • 11:27

    Good question isn’t it?

    That the start. Not the end.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. lwbut
    05/15/2017 • 01:11

    The saddest part of having people you love is losing them ‘permanently’ (in my world view we don’t, we just lose the perspectives of them we have chosen to hold on to for this lifetime).

    Are we luckier if we live to see all our friends/relatives die – or if we are the first of our friends to go away and so avoid the grief? Or does a good balance have us placed somewhere in the middle?

    There has to be an ending to a human life, or anything that has an identifiable beginning point, the best thing we can do is make sure that we do what we want, or have the ability to do that we’d like to, before that ending comes. Oh, and not to waste too much of our short, precious time worrying over the inevitable. 🙂

    Live like there is no tomorrow… for one day – and we never know in advance which one – you’ll be right. 😉

    love.

    Like

  3. Rich Paschall
    05/14/2017 • 15:19

    Apparently the Final Countdown has been going on for decades.

    Liked by 1 person