"I love the past, 'cause I hate suspense."
- Diane Young, by Vampire Weekend
The interesting thing about being alive is that we know what's come before, but not what will be. Well, that isn't the only interesting thing, obviously, but it's an aspect of existence that fascinates me. Put another way, we know the past, but never the future. And, there will always be a future -- something epochal would have to occur for that to change.
I've been ruminating on the aforementioned reality somewhat often during this pandemic. Additionally, I've considered the importance of the shared experiences we have, both en masse and amongst our smaller, more tightly-knit sub-groups (friends, family, that sort of thing). It is a significant factor to know our history, but there's nothing quite like going through a major event at the same time as those we know, those fellow humans who mean something special to us.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, my thoughts have sometimes drifted to those whose names and familial titles regular readers of this blog may have heard of: my dad, grandparents, aunt Charlease and uncle Paul, and my friends Tracy and Bret. The commonality they all share is that they're all deceased. So what? you may ask. We're all a long-time dead. Everyone has missed-out on a whole lot of history. That is true, though, as I mentioned earlier, everyone who is alive now and has had at least a modicum of an education, knows something of world events. The same can't be said for what comes after.
My father knew of the Civil War, of Pearl Harbor and World War II, heck, he fought in Vietnam. He was around for the Challenger disaster, and the invention of the VCR and home computers. But, he knew nothing of the September 11th attacks, and certainly missed-out on the coronavirus. Is it important? Is it particularly consequential that all of those people I mentioned earlier are gone and not conscious of what has happened in the world since their deaths? Is it meaningful that they don't know what is going on right now? No, I suppose it isn't, not in the grand scheme of things.
Still, there are things I wish I could tell them. There are things I wish they could know about, that they could experience with me. It's a selfish impulse, isn't it, this desire for the dead to know of something like a pandemic? Why would I want them here, potentially in danger, sheltering-in-place, not even able to be with them physically? Perhaps I just want them here, period. I mean, that's the fascinating aspect of our existence: Something like 100 billion people have lived on this earth, and in our lives we only know a comparative handful of them. It makes sense that we'd cling onto them, onto their memory, during particularly uncertain times.
And, selfishly, the permanent absence of the ones I love only serves to remind me of my own, future truancy from this world. So it goes.
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