My new year did not start on a high note. Here in the western US, it wasn't 2023 yet when I actually posted my 2022 Retrospective, and I just finished editing a draft to create my last post.
After my shift at the library, I went over to @generikat's homestead where our assorted game groups along with a few neighbors and other friends were planning to ring in the new year in a more subdued celebration befitting our more introverted tendencies. However, while I was playing with cats and toddlers, I got a text message from another friend saying he had just learned his grandmother had died a few days ago.
This other friend is one of the people I have known the longest since my family moved here. We have hunted ground squirrels, rambled in the woods, played video games, and shared favorite books for a good two decades. His parents had a small home on a large family tract of land, and he had a room at his grandmother's old cabin just a hop, skip, and a jump from his parents place by the time I met him. His grandmother was descended from pioneer stock and her home had been frequently updated and added on to over the years, but still showed evidence of its original log cabin core.
Something like this, but with more lean-to additions, less yard, and smaller dogs. Image credit
She had old family photos, depression glass, and knick-knacks galore. I can't say I was ever close enough to their family to feel like I could consider her an adoptive grandmother, but I did like her. She was kindly, but also tough and stubborn in her independence, yet very much the family matriarch, if that makes any sense.
Needless to say, when I heard she had died, plans changed. I don't know what to do or say when someone is going through that kind of loss, but I can be there. So I went. We drank some, we played games, we reminisced, and I drove home under far more influence of sugar and caffeine than alcohol, because I don't drive drunk, and I definitely don't want to drive drunk on New Year's Day in the wee hours of the morning. The caffeine severely messed up my sleep cycle, which is why I decided to just finish an old draft instead of posting about this yesterday.
There is a strange juxtaposition of feelings while everyone else is celebrating the end of a new year with the start of another as I am remembering someone who is gone now. Not quite family, not just an acquaintance, someone I always intended to drop in on and say, "hi," next time I passed through Montana, but that all got set aside when COVID happened and travel plans were set aside. I'm feeling a tinge of melancholy along with the optimism for the coming Spring.
I have no moral to the story. No wise conclusions about how we should live our lives. Just an acknowledgement that life goes on whether we want it to or not, and then ends. If nothing else, be there for those who aren't having a good start to the year. Have friends you can count on and try to be the friend others can call when needed.
