Grief
A friend, 61, died Friday morning after a long, surgery-induced illness. I hope her family sues and at least gets some financial help with her bills. Seven weeks in Intensive Care can be pricey. But I battle more with the meaning of it. In the poem Out, Out, Robert Frost ends the story of a young boy's grisly, accidental death with the lines, "Nothing to build on there. And because they were not the one dead, they turned to their own affairs." I don't want my friend's, or anyone's death, to be so easily forgotten because, well, we're so busy, and we're not the one dead. And yet I find myself thinking "I have to go see Brenda in the hospital" and then realizing I don't have to, and then being relieved. And that makes me all the more conscious of the fact that we will all be dead, and possibly forgotten easily, too.