A couple of hours before Lost last night -- more on that later -- my sister called to tell me that she had received a phone call to tell us that my mother's best friend's husband had died. Long story short: we didn't get funeral details because they didn't expect us to go, and the call came kind of third-hand, and they were living in Long Island so I just planned to call his wife and daughter sometime today. I looked online for his obituary to see when the funeral was so I could call later, and found out that although the service was out there, the burial was near here, in New Jersey, where they were from originally and where their family cemetery plot is. So I left school for a few hours and went.In some ways, it was like seeing people in my own family I hadn't seen in a long time. I have known this people for, I'd guess, 50 years. I remember seeing their daughter riding in a baby carriage, and she's two and a half years younger than I am, so I would have been three or so, so that's 50 years. They are all in all our old home movies. The baby in the carriage was my first best friend. Back then, we lived in a garden apartment, where the upstairs and downstairs apartments share a common front door and hallway; they lived downstairs and we were up. That's how our families became friends. Five years later or so, they moved to a house in a town on the other side of the county, and six months later, they found a house on the same street for my parents to buy, and they did. We always had Thanksgivings together, and they joined us for Passover from time to time. One of their grandmas was a widow who visited often; I called her Grandma, too. Their other grandparents were weird little mirror images of my own, and in time, those two sets of grandparents became friends, too, and went away to the country together in the summer.
My mother's friend, newly a widow now, is a very distinctive sort of person; her husband was quiet, we always said, because he couldn't get a word in edgewise. But he was always there, quiet, with a very dry sense of humor (probably why he and my father got along so well), very intelligent. I remember he took me and his daughter to see Sleeping Beauty at the movies when we were little. When we could convince them on a lazy Sunday afternoon, he and my father took us to the pony rides.
Little by little, bit by bit, the remaining flakes of my childhood are falling away. It is a very strange thing, yet at the same time, I know it is a universal experience. When something happens, I always think of my parents when they were old and realize that they experienced this, too. The loss, one a time, of their parents and all who were left in their parents' generation. And the losses that begin to happen in one's own generation, as I lost my cousin last month. The passage of time and what that brings with it.
Lost tomorrow, then, perhaps.
