Lately I’ve been overrun with old memories, some of them going back decades, like my Mom passing away and my sister Celia, both in Toronto, and my first wife, Dorothy, who was from Scotland. And yes, the positive memories are more than the other kind, for sure. The difference, though, is the sad ones are individually more powerful, because of the awareness of “gone” that is involved. You just have to learn to live with both and not get overwhelmed by the sad stuff to where you’re no use to anyone, even yourself.
This bout was a particularly bad couple of weeks over a friend of mine here, Colin Ming, someone I truly admired for his always positive stance on life, laugh always at hand and what a laugh….it would literally shake him. He died tragically about two weeks ago, coming through an intersection in town, on his motorcycle, and an ambulance came through on its red light and hit him. We weren’t bosom pals, but we were close, mutual admiration thing, and it just flattened me. If you’d asked me to pick a person I didn’t want to die, Colin would have been way up on the list. I cried when I heard, and several times since. There is a feeling of a gap in my chest since… an actual space. Brings me down, man. I didn’t dwell on it, but it wouldn’t stop coming at me, over and over, bringing tears. No answers, of course, just weeping. There never is, of course, for things like that – the sudden flash of it, shocking, stunning. You’re left staring, and fighting to hold back the tears, and feeling these regrets, remembering the life you shared so naturally, so vividly, so suddenly gone. And with it, this deep melancholy, swamping you, like the very air is tainted by the piercing sorrow of it all.
The episode I’ve mentioned here is something we all have to deal with at some point with important persons in our life. All we can do at those times of loss and deep sorrow is to reflect on the magical interaction of the life experience with those individuals who have been part of the wonders of living in our time on earth. The sadness is part of the price we pay. It comes to the mind uninvited reminding us of that life experience and the joy and beauty that came with it.
