I was not prepared for friends dying. I don’t think death was new in my life. While a young child I lost some cousins, grandparents, and in my late teens and early twenties some friends and more relatives. I think I was not emotionally mature enough to really have those experiences though, they were less experiences I had – in the sense of embedding events within an understanding of the world and sense of self through which to experience the events – than they were just undigested occurrences which I underexperienced, so to speak. Did anyone else die after that? I can no longer remember – I feel guilty about not being sure if I remember the dead or not – until my late 30s or so when another grandparent died and a friend died and then in my early 40s these last two years more friends have died, and most of them after I’d lost touch but had meant to re-establish, all of them friends I wished to be in more regular contact with. Of course death is more generally on my mind amid the nightmare of the pandemic.

It all gets to be a lot sometimes. Some nights when I’m washing dishes, especially if I’ve had a beer – I’m a huge lightweight now – it spills out, sudden rushes of quiet crying. I am someday going to need to read about or see a therapist about how to grieve properly. I’d like to write about the year we did an ofrenda, my suddenly overflowing with grief over lost relatives. (“Lost” a way to not look the loss quite so fully in the emptiness where a face should be.) Another time, maybe in this post, I’m unsure.