I sat at my desk during my coffee break and noticed someone on Facebook tagged me in a post. We went to the same high school and the last couple of years I connected with people from those days. I don’t connect with everyone, and they connected with people I have no interest in ‘friending’ on the site. It’s a great way to keep up on things like weddings, this time, their kids, and in some cases grandkids. A few have teenagers. Kids these days call it ‘adulting.’ Typically nobody tags people unless it’s something or someone, we know.
I picked up the phone, hit the notification, and found an obituary posted for someone who passed away last week at 48. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I whispered. I remembered the guy from basketball at my high school and as someone who adopted this new music genre called hip-hop. Ours was a high school of mostly heavy metal with the hair. It’s the second death in the last three years as those graduating from my high school between 87-89 have not hit 50 just yet.
Yes, people have passed away before their time. Sometimes it takes a few passings to drive home to the point we are not teenagers or young adults anymore. We are now the generation the new one coming up look at as ‘old’. It’s the hits of the 80’s that now play on classic rock stations, not the hits of our parents. The beginning of people passing away in more numbers now hit us as it now hits our parents. I look at these same people with gray hair or trying to cover them. (I admit to the latter.) We may or may not have a midlife crisis. We may or may not have a reckoning with our lives as it unfolded. We do have a finite time on this earth only to live our lives as best as we can. It’s funny to know if someone says ‘that is so last century’ we can say ‘yeah, that’s our time.’
We don’t know when that time is up.
How do I say goodbye to what we had?
The good times that made us laugh
Outweigh the badI thought we’d get to see forever
But forever’s gone away
It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday
Unpaused Life 