Thanks Dee.

This blog is a little more somber than the others I suppose. A bit more melancholy, a bit more sober. You see, today I lost an important member of my broadly weaving social circle and it caused me to pause a moment.

She's not a family member, though her family has all but taken me in. She's not a teacher, though she's shared more than a few life lessons over gin and tonics. She's not even I knew for very long, or spent a significant amount of time with. Just enough time to know. Today I lost my best friend's grandmother, by the name of Dee. Which, to type it out, makes it feel a small event. But in reality, it weighs heavily on my concience. In fact, it weighs arguably heavier than my own grandmother's death, which in a sad occurence, was one year ago this day.

I have also been recently moving apartments. The economic climate these days has forced me out of my plush two bed and two bath apartment into a more austere one bedroom unit, which I really should have been in all along. It turns out to be a dissapointingly small savings each month for the move, but each little bit counts. Anyway, as I was moving, I stumbled across my old senior yearbook. As I flipped through the pages, I ran across an old familiar name. Again, not someone I'm attached to strongly, but just enough to feel a twinge of sadness. Her name is Susanna Stodden, a onetime high school classmate and fellow college dorm inhabitant. She also would have been present at (it turns out later) mutual friend Rick's wedding as a bridesmaid. She was murdered a few summers ago along with her mother a few summers ago as they hiked a trail up near Bellingham. I googled her name, hoping that justice had caught up with their killer, but no such luck.

What Susanna and Dee have in common is that they are both people who left just enough of an impression on me to know that they were inherently good people. If you consider all the folks one comes in contact with on a daily, weekly or even yearly basis, sometimes that seems a rare quality. They really, really were, and I really, really wish they were still with us.

To face death is one of the inevitable tasks of being alive as most of us have found out. However, it's the folks that you know deep down in your heart deserve life that make you angry at death. Make you want to yell and scream and throw a tantrum. Make you yell at the sky at night about things not being fair. Somehow in my head, if my best friend's grandmother, and my friend's wife's bridesmaid were still alive, my life would be more balanced, more fair, more just. But they are not, so it is not.

So I grieve quietly when I am alone. I catch myself thinking that I am overly sentimental, that these things should be felt, dealt with and then moved along from. But that is just not my style. It is a good reminder about mortality, about what the real cost of being alive is, and what the penalty for taking things for granted is and what the payoff for living fully is. No possible incarnation of a hell can persecute or a heaven reward as fully as what your reputation you leave behind on earth will impress on your soul. And in the case of these good folks, their memory is cherished by people they barely really knew which is as good a reward as you can get from your work on earth I guess.

So here's my thanks to Dee and Susanna, and also a somber New Year's resolution. I am hoping to be a little more courageous this year (like Susanna), and a little more generous (like Dee). I'm hoping to participate a bit more in what life has to offer (like Susanna) and open my home selflessly to others (like Dee). I'm hoping that these little giant events in my life wake up a bit so that when my time's at an end, whether it be sooner or later, someone may have known for very little may pause a bit too.

So thanks and goodbye Dee and Susanna.


Also, a special thanks to her husband Don. I won't pretend to know what the pain is like of losing a wife, and I earnestly hope I never feel it. But I hope the outpour of love from your family can help ease your mind. I hope the stories flow, I hope the memories never dim.