Remembering David

Today was the Remembrance Day of David. It’s been two years since he was gone.

David was the first friend I had when I started this job 9 years ago. We worked in the same department and somehow we just clicked right away. Everyone else in the department was conservative, old, and narrow-minded, except for David. He was a real physicist working with nuclear power stuff before he moved to the City of Rain for this job. He had been battling with colon cancer since he was 40, or even before that, because when I first met him he told me he already had a surgery for colon cancer before. He died at age 50, and I was 37.

When he died, I cried a lot, at work and at home. But the bizarre thing was that when I had my talk therapy that week, I didn’t mention his death at all; I somehow completely blacked out about the whole thing. Me at that point wasn’t really me, even though I was already getting talk therapy. I lived numbly and didn’t have many emotions besides resentment towards my life, towards Angel. The week before he died, he still came to work every day and I even observed him one time just a week before he died. We talked about doing a project together and he said that’d be fun, and he was probably thinking he might not live long enough to actually do it.

I’ve been thinking about death lately and I’m terrified by it. I don’t have any friends close to my age in my life at this point; all the people who vibe with me are older than I am, some are nearing 50 or beyond. This means I’m nearing that stage in life where I start to lose people to death. If I can only live up to 50 and I still don’t have X in my life by that point, then I feel that this life I have was doomed, or wasted.

My biggest fear is not being able to see my kids grow to a point where they can be independent and self-sufficient. Without knowing this I can never stop worrying about them.

If life is so transient, so short, what exactly are we waiting for then?