Jennie Ridyard.
My mum was once looking at an old class photo of hers from post-wartime England when she said something that’s always stuck with me.
She said: “I wonder how many of them are still alive?”
I now think she was lucky in her ignorance.
How wonderful to wonder; how terrible to know, to count them slip away.
I thought of this last week when I found myself in floods of tears at the imminent death of an old school chum, taken off life support and moved to a hospice.
Save the sympathies though, because I hadn’t seen him for at least 25 years, more even, for we last hung out in high school. I’d “seen” him on Facebook of course, but Facebook and I drifted apart two years ago, then broke up, and I hadn’t even known this boy from my youth was sick.
It was only when another friend sent me a screenshot of the news that I felt the pain of it and started to cry. I sobbed stupidly, disproportionately, weeping for someone I haven’t seen this century until I was as crumpled and soggy as the tissues scattered around me.
Now I’m left wondering why. Sure, I cried for him, his family, his friends, his poor wife updating Facebook even while she counted his departing breaths, but mostly I think I was crying for all the pain that is yet to come to every single one of us. I cried for the inevitable goodbyes we’re going to have to say to friends, parents, siblings, sometimes even to our children.
I’ve said a few goodbyes myself, though nothing yet that breaks a person to leave a hole that never fills, but I feel my future losses biding their time, sucker-punch ready.
And this is why I’m glad I don’t see the day-to-day doings of people I used to know any more; this is why I’m glad I stepped away from social media, from keeping up to speed with every passing ship.
We have evolved to embrace a core of loved ones and it is these we are emotionally equipped to tend closely, to fret over. But on Facebook, people I would have left in the past became part of my present: my core group numbered an impossible 500 people. It’s not natural.
It’s not doable. I am – we are – not robust enough to mourn the passing of everyone we ever knew. It simply hurts too much.
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