People die without our knowing it.

The older I get, the more I’m struck by how people die without our knowing it, and we don’t find out till some amount of time later, and then you suddenly discover that the world isn’t the way you thought it had been for a while, since the people who you thought were in it aren't anymore and hadn't been for some time.

Like a few years ago I had heard through people that a guy I knew from college had gotten cancer real young and passed away, and at the time I had meant to write his mother, since I had met her because she was an administrator at a place where I worked for a few summers.

Then, like a two years after that guy died, I had met up with a friend from college, and the guy’s death from cancer came up, and I said I really should write a note to his mother since I knew her and she’d appreciate it, even so long after.

“But she died too,” he was like, and he filled me in that her life had also gotten snuffed out, actually before her son had, I believe.

And at that, I discovered that someone who I thought was alive had actually been dead for years.

The other week, I had gotten the newspaper from the campus neighborhood and didn’t read it, but for some reason kept it out on my kitchen table to read, even when the new issue came out and I read that one first.

Then, one evening at a new bar, I was going through the newspaper, and there in the back was a death announcement for the old (white) (retired) woman who I knew from school, and who I had set up a birthday dinner for with my one (black) friend who used to staff the security desk just inside the entrance to the main library on campus.

It turns out that she had had a short illness and was in hospice for 2 weeks, and then died on April 3^rd – and I didn’t find out for more than 2 weeks after that.

Oddly, I had been thinking of her just that past week.  I had been talking with someone about all the weird shit that people who are nurses see, and after that conversation I had been thinking about a story she told me from years ago when she was a nurse.  One time she was in the ER, and in came this young beautiful tempestuous Russian woman who to spite her boyfriend in an argument had impulsively gulped down a glass of lye, which ate through her esophagus and upper organs.  There was nothing they could do but just link up tubes to the gaping holes in her chest as best they could and clear away fluid as she slowly died and her organs shut down one by one, even though the Russian woman had thought that doctors could fix what she did when she did it, and she didn’t really mean to kill herself.  If I'm not mistaken, they gave her several weeks to live like that, but death was inevitable.

That happens more and more as you get older, I hear, that people pass away and you don’t realize how many people you know among the dead already.