Again, and again, and again

The thing about being a precocious child, is that you turn into a precocious teenager. And a precocious teenager doesn't really want to hang out with other teenagers, and makes friends with older and more mature fellows.

This leads to heartbreak and being left behind. 

First memorably, by a group of women I admired and counted myself a friend among for a decade, and who forcibly removed me from their circle - uninvited, explicitly, to my face - because I was "too young" and they didn't want to admit in my hearing what it was like to be aging. (Years later I have not yet recovered from that shock fully, and I don't think I'll ever trust a group of women as unguardedly as I had.)

And now, as I'm at the dreaded "middle age", I am getting my heart broken over and over as the older people who I am still friends with all these years later, go on before me. My final grandmother passed. Friends from high school, and college, and after college. The work colleagues who I hear about passing months- or years-belatedly, of some ailment, of some disaster. The number of live-hard die-hard Burning Man folks who've passed due to illness, accident, or by their own hands. The unending march of the Skyfaire list, of all the Rennies who've passed on to wave banners and eat turkey legs at a perfect-temperature dustless faire in the sky. The Odd Salon fixtures who seemed an unending well of stories, suddenly capped and inaccessible.

The more interesting people I meet in my many lives and many travels, the more it seems I am just going to eventually lose. 

Tonda, Teflon, my amazing goth friend, old school St Maxian, Burning Man Cafe shift lead, historical costume stitch-counter, Georgian romance writer, mastiff enthusiast, historian spitfire Juno of a woman, is dying. The brain cancer we thought was in remission is no longer, and they've reached point where nothing they can do for her will extend her life more than a month or so at most. And so, on reflection, she has decided she's done. I haven't heard her voice in ages, but I can hear it in my head - loud, firm, brash. She is DONE. I immediately got a mental image of her in her Germans, tellerbarret cocked at a jaunty angle, kirtling up her skirts and kicking Charon off the boat and into the Styx, poling herself across the river on her own time thankyouverymuch. 

But it's hard to remember her howling with laughter with a cocktail in her hand, watching Duel at Blood Creek at 1am at Costume College, when confronted with her dozing unconscious form, the hovering hospice care workers, the resigned quiet of the room. Her hands are still soft, but cool, and held them while I told her about all the people who were shocked to hear about her going, and how much she is adored, how much she will be missed. There will never be another like her. And we all know that and are bracing ourselves for impact. 

There is a sickening symmetry with last October, leaving with a few hours notice to visit another friend, insensible and dying in a hospital bed surrounded by loved ones. This is too soon. Too much death. Too SOON.  

There's a comfort in the fact, once again, that my friend has made a choice, and is leaving with dignity and agency intact. And in this case at least, comfort in the fact that she's not in any pain. (I only recently learned that brain cancer apparently doesn't hurt because your brain doesn't have pain receptors. I can't tell if I'm relieved or horrified.)

I love you Tonda. May you pass gently into the next world, your work here being so well discharged. May we meet again in joy and light, far far from this earthly plane.