The Older You Get, the More Dead People You Know

The older you get, the more dead people you know. They are everywhere, all around you now.

Back when you were young, optimistic and immortal, you could count your dead folks on one or two hands. A grandparent here, an aunt there. And eventually, of course, one parent followed by the other.

But now — if you have lucked out and have reached your 80s like me — the dead are legion. 

The men are dying first, it seems. My husband died four years ago. His older brother died earlier this year. Five of my dear friends have lost their — dear to me — husbands in recent years.

Others I have lost: Rocque Lipford, my very Catholic college friend from Monroe, Michigan, who wanted me to know that, “You have a soul, Barbie.”

Also Paul, a college friend who visited San Francisco in the 1970s, when Jon and I were in the throes of a lengthy on-again-off-again relationship. After a dinner with Jon and me at a Chinese restaurant, Paul declared Jon, “a good man.”

Those words were enough to get me off the dime where Jon was concerned. What the heck, I thought, if Jon is a good guy, why don’t I just go ahead and commit?

The Older You Get, the More Dead People You Know

But it’s not only the close friends and family who have joined the dead. So have people I barely knew when they were alive — but whom I also treasure for the slice of time we had together. 

I think of people like Blaine Brende, the tree trimmer who stood on our deck with me one day admiring, as I did, the swooping limbs of our cypress tree.

Blaine and I were considering how to prune the light-starved and misshapen oak tree at the foot of my lot. Blaine wanted me to know that he and his crew would take care with my tree. “We don’t do ugly.”

All these people are dead, of course. But that doesn’t mean they’re not still my friends, that I don’t know them still in a very real way.

They are right here next to me, you see, all of them, accompanying me and inhabiting my world just as truly as if they were as alive as the two living, breathing guys in the house across the street from me, who are mostly out of sight.

I may not see much of those two men, but I know they are there, just as surely as Jude, their basso profondo Weimaraner, is there, barking me a greeting over his front yard fence when I come outdoors to check my mailbox, letting me know that he is there and so is everybody else.

The story of an unlucky dog whose master died last week at “James Dobson: Bully Your Pet, Hit Your Kid, Make Them Obey You — And God.” 

A story about friendship at “Tending a Friendship. I’m on Her Calendar, She’s on Mine.”