"Jagvar" (Jagvar)
12/19/2015 at 10:33 • Filed to: None
2
7|
"Jagvar" (Jagvar)
12/19/2015 at 10:33 • Filed to: None | 2
| 7 |
Two years ago, cancer claimed Shannon at age 28. She was the first high school classmate of mine to pass away. Thursday night, a second classmate, James, was
!!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!
. He was a Navy pilot who had just gotten his flight instructor’s license on Tuesday. James was teaching his 18-year-old cousin in his RV4 (similar to pictured). Apparently, it was their first lesson together, and something went terribly wrong. Investigators think weather was a factor, but details are slow in coming. I wasn’t terribly close to James, but it’s still shocking and sad. For as long as I knew him, he was extremely passionate about flying, and always dreamed of being a pilot. Just awful news all around.
X37.9XXS
> Jagvar
12/19/2015 at 10:42 |
|
This has always helped me:
Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky
walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs
right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born
and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone
stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are
upriver from you. The younger ones stand braced on the bar
downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of
time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.
Your time, the time of all your contemporaries, schoolmates, your
loves and your adversaries, is that part of the shifting bar on which
you stand. And it is crowded at first. You can see the way it thins
out, upstream from you. The old ones are washed away and their bodies
go swiftly by, like logs in the current. Downstream where the younger
ones stand thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash away.
Always there is more room where you stand, but always the swift water
grows deeper, and you feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under
your feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for a safer
place can nudge you off balance, and you are gone. Someone who has
stood beside you for a long time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to
catch their hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are gone.
There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the roar of the water, the
shifting, gritty sound of sand and gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries
of despair as the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken by
the current. Some old ones who stand on a good place, well braced,
understanding currents and balance, last a long time. A Churchill,
fat cigar atilt, sourly amused at his own endurance and, in the end,
indifferent to rivers and the rage of waters. Far downstream from you
are the thin, startled cries of the ones who never got planted, never
got set, never quite understood the message of the torrent.
John D. MacDonald
$kaycog
> Jagvar
12/19/2015 at 10:50 |
|
Such a tragedy. I’m so sorry.
Michael Parker
> Jagvar
12/19/2015 at 10:58 |
|
Very sorry to hear, but also count yourself lucky that it took ten years for you to experience the loss of high school classmates.
Within just a few years of graduation we had a rash of suicides claim the lives of 3 classmates. It was a tough couple years to keep hearing about deaths of people so young.
Frenchlicker
> Michael Parker
12/19/2015 at 11:50 |
|
Along that train of thought be lucky you made it out of school without experiencing any loss.
DrScientist
> Jagvar
12/19/2015 at 13:13 |
|
Sad indeed, especially considering the loss of the teen aged cousin.
However, to be 30 years old and only have experienced 2 deaths among classmates, consider yourself lucky. I believe I attended 4 funerals of high school classmates before graduating college.
Car accidents, meningitis, suicide, cancer, dumb luck...
McMike
> Jagvar
12/19/2015 at 14:31 |
|
:(
|
Jagvar
> McMike
12/19/2015 at 15:02 |
|
Yep, that’s them. I never met Maitand, but James was just an all-around nice guy.