Gone Too Soon

I broke my writing streak last week, as I went home to Pittsburgh for a funeral. My good friend from high school, T, passed away suddenly. He lived in the same neighborhood as me, and we graduated together. If not for some weird last minute circumstances, he was going to be a groomsman in my wedding. He was my age: not even forty years old yet, with a daughter left behind.

The trip home was a conflicted one. The gut-wrenching feelings of seeing my friend in the casket and knowing that this would be the last time I saw him were paired with a rare reunion: getting to see all my old friends again, all in one place for once. I caught myself feeling happy at times in seeing loved ones I hadn't seen in years, and then felt guilty for feeling that way. Why should I be happy at a time like this?

I had planned on writing something on the plane, or maybe that evening when I got back. But I keep deleting the sentences that I write, even now a week later. Everything sounds wrong, and trite, and not enough.

I didn't really want to write about T. But I also am having a really hard time looking through my drafts and trying to write about personal finances, or the quirks of human decision making, or anything related to money.

"Try to Minimize Your Taxes. Or Don't. It Doesn't Really Matter."

"You May Be Paying Too Much for Investment Fees, but Who Cares When You Think About Our Mortality"

I don't know how I'm supposed to feel after saying goodbye to T, but I guess I thought there'd be some feeling of gratitude: of appreciating the life that I have and seizing the day and all that.

Instead, I find myself feeling anxious, like my life could be taken at any moment. Instead of gratitude, I feel a kind of fear.

I rode my bike the other day and thought, someone could be texting behind the wheel right now and I wouldn't even know it. They'd have no idea I was there, either, maybe let the car drift to the right, and just take me out. Is this helmet going to save me? Would they even stop to see if I was okay?

It doesn't have to be sudden, either. The doctor could find something in my bloodwork at my next physical. Cancer happens all the time, there's some history of it in my family, and the treatment often doesn't work.

My instinct is to find the something good that comes out of this. I am texting and talking to my old friends more, so that is something good. T would have liked that.

But the overriding feeling I have now is some sort of dread. Of knowing that, yes, I am going to die, and I have no idea when or how.

And it's not like I'm a very young person, or that I've never made terrible, life-risking decisions before. It could have been me in a casket by thirty nine instead of T. He was just unluckier.

There's a weird kind of nihilism creeping in to my thoughts the past couple weeks, and it makes a lot of the things I'm doing with my life seem pointless. Who cares if we reach financial independence by forty, or at all? Does it really matter if my job is stressing me out or if it's some sort of meaningful passion?

The daily stresses I find myself in, of trying to decide when we should start trying for MC Baby and coordinating our parental leave, or will the market change our plans for financial independence...I won't say they've gone away, because they haven't. They just seem absurd. I catch myself every now and again and I think, who the fuck cares? This doesn't matter. None of this matters.

This is supposed to be the place where I focus on some things that do matter, like Mrs. Done by Forty and Baby AF, and then I get some sort of meaningful catharsis and feel a bit better.

But then I start thinking about them being taken away too soon. I realize that they, too, could pass away without warning, and I have to stop thinking about it. It's one thing to think about my own mortality. But I'm not going to start thinking about theirs yet.

I keep coming back to the fact that none of us knows how much time we have left. That's the deal. It's not a great deal but it's the one we've got: I suppose the best thing to do is accept it.

Like everyone, I used to make fun of the YOLO mentality back when it was a thing a decade ago. But I begrudgingly have to admit the millennials were on to something. We really only live this one time, this one life. And it's short: we just don't know how short.

I want to wrap this up with something hopeful and good, nestled in a metaphor of a seed sprouting out of the soil or something. But that is not happening today.

The most positive thing I can say right now is that your life is precious. It's fragile. We are fragile.

Please be careful out there, friends.




*Photo is from UPSID3D0WN at Flickr Creative Commons.

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