Well, I got the news last evening that my stepmother has passed just a few months after she hit her 90th birthday. And I realized a few days ago on the 24th but my father would have hit 90 on that date had he lived past 71. My last aunt passed away on August 31st, and going to her funeral was the reason I couldn’t make the Cal Poly tailgate or game. She was the widow of my last paternal relation who died in 2013, after never recovering out of his anesthesia post knee operation.
This woman that passed last night is of course the widow of my father. I lost my mother in the summer of 2022, and my stepfather in the summer of 2024. Both of my mother’s siblings passed away before she did, and my father’s younger sister passed away from a car accident in 1976, and then of course his brother as I mentioned earlier. Both my father and his mother passed in 2007, and my maternal grandparents passed in the fall of 2006 and February of 2008.
It does seem to have gone in several very odd and sad waves. But after a lot of serious thinking I think I have one tiny tie to one last person from the generations before me: the sister of my stepfather. Normally I wouldn’t consider that a lot of relation as I never had any real connection or tie to my step mother’s siblings. But this step Aunt, as you would call her, did take an interest in myself and my sister when we lived with my mother and stepfather in Seattle in the late sixties. I still remember her bringing up a makeshift spook alley in the top floor gabled rooms of their parents house.
All of this helps me realize shortly before my own 64th birthday in december, that it’s a sad and almost brutal thing to realize that at my age there is no one left ahead of my generation. Just my siblings as distant as they are, and my cousins, who I had not seen since their father’s funeral in 2013.
When I see the giant turmoil of fascism and moral decay around us in the country, I realize my own health will not allow me to be a political activist or do anything really demonstrative. I’m pretty much limited to a fairly isolated and shut in life at this point. But it’s also an opportunity to live up to the beliefs I have been talking about for so many years and fall back on the simple faith and serenity that comes from that. To quote loosely the concepts from the new testament, it is time for me to be a light to the world, and let that example draw people to me to try and help give them hope and understanding of how to survive this slow rolling apocalypse and crisis we see happening.
It is definitely a two-edged sword living life like this: while there are no arguments or challenges that come from anyone I’m living with or even the pet to focus on, and therefore no arguments about anything I can watch what I want or play what game I want whenever I want. But the same time I’m also responsible for everything alone by myself too which is becoming a much more challenging issue, with my continued deterioration in physical health regarding my ability to get up and down off the floor problems with my back, problems with my legs, etc.
I suppose living in isolation like this also does help me insulate from a lot of the pain and suffering and difficulty of some of the other aspects of life, and it does help lessen the impact of these deaths of these last few older generation relatives. I can feel sad, but not be assailed by grief.
It has been a joyous sort of discovery that these meal gatherings of a couple of us core board members have been a wonderful change of pace for me, and they mean a lot. There are other people to talk to you rather than just ranting to myself in the silence of my apartment.
I don’t post this in a blatant glaring fishing attempt at sympathy or compassion or any of that other business. Anybody who ever feels like expressing that toward me I’m very grateful but I’m not specifically looking for it unlike a whole bunch of other people out there in the world. It’s mostly chance just to express myself my thoughts, and maybe solicit other people’s reflections on any similar challenges they face in their life. Even if you’re married you can still feel a lot of this isolation.
But my special thanks to new bombturk, sweetgrass, ute with dogs, and for their one appearance so far, Greginslc and Maake. I may not be quite as up to date on some of the football or even general athletic awareness of some of the rest of you, but the spirit is certainly there.
I hope everyone find something wonderful to do tomorrow on Halloween to try and recapture the joy of our youth and some of the shenanigans we all got up to. I was fairly well behaved kid that was just always my personality. I really hate these late games, when they’re not in our old beloved pac-12 circle of suck conference. But I’m hoping I will actually make it up to the tailgate this time, especially now that I do not have to worry about the colonoscopy on monday. I’ve canceled that to deal with family related issues.
I am curious, I know we have a lot of older folks on the board, but we also have some younger folks. How many of you have not been exposed to the pop culture phenomenon that is sweeping the country right now, AKA Kpop demon hunters? Do not be surprised if you see a lot of kids I’m even some of those dressing up as one of the characters from that Netflix movie this year.
