Sic transit gloria mundi

I've got to stop reading the obituaries. While perusing the death notices in the Buffalo News, as I do when I read the paper online, I came across a familiar name. The younger brother of a former friend died. We all lived in the Maryvale apartments in Cheektowaga, NY, right outside of Buffalo. It mentioned that his mother is still alive (she would have to be in her late 70s at least) but that his father had died. When it listed his brothers and sisters, my friend was listed as the late so and so. We were the same age. It also listed a wife. The brother doesn't seem to ever have gotten married. There is, of course, no way to know when my friend had died. I could probably look it up, but the point of this is that we were the same age. They were from some Scandinavian country that I don't quite remember anymore. My friend had that white, blonde hair. Their mother was very attractive.

Something similar happened last year. I saw that the mother of a friend from elementary school died. I remembered her as a beautiful, very nice lady. I had stayed over at their house a few times as a kid before we moved to Cheektowaga. In fact, when I was showing my daughter around Buffalo when we went back last summer to visit my wife's grave, we drove past their house, and I recounted an incident where their dog had decided to jump from their second floor porch to the grass below and survived. I wondered at that time what had happened to them and where my friend Jamie was. When I saw the death notice later, it listed his brother but said he was the late Jamie. I decided to try and do some research then and found out that Jamie had died in the 1960s. That had a very chilling effect on me. The cause of death was not clear, and I wasn't going to get in touch with his brother to see what happened. "Say, you may not remember me, but we knew each other 40 years ago." I know not everybody has the same relationship with the past as I do. I remembered meeting Jamie at the University of Buffalo one day. We were both freshmen. Though we hadn't seen each other since 5th grade, we recognized each other. We briefly caught up with each other's lives, talked about classes and then said goodbye. He probably died not too long after that. All those years, I had thought of him as alive.

I guess what made this more somber than it should have been, though reminders of our mortality are always somber, was that I just finished clearing out some things of my wife's that I had never gotten around to. I also had to take in our vacuum cleaner to be fixed, and the guy asked about my wife since she had been the one who always took care of that kind of stuff and bought the cleaner at his store.

How brief our existence is on this earth.