Did You Know There Would be So Much Death

Everyone wants to live long, but no one wants to grow old.

You ever hear that expression? I have. It made me think that the main problem with the passage of time is growing old. The aging I have experienced really sucks, to be perfectly honest. Once, I was young and beautiful. Now I am middle aged and very attractive. I do the best I can to stay in shape, and sure I look better than other people my age but compared to my former self, well, my appearance is not the same. I don’t like it, but I guess it would be unbearably freaky not to age, to truly look 21. Listen to me, writing as if I had been offered the chance to not show my age, but for the sake of keeping to the natural order of things, I declined. Lol. I thought aging was the worst part of time passing. And then, people started to die. At first, it was people much older than me, and far removed from me, like actors from the early days of Hollywood. I had no family, so I did not have to experience the worst part of loving someone I grew up with–the inevitable loss of that person. But now, death is everywhere. People I know, people I know of, famous people whose work affected my life (Prince, Michael Jackson). The circle of people I hung out with is diminishing. It was a loose circle, not a tight group. I found out about the death of the person who used to drive me to my escort appointments around the island when I worked for an escort service that had ads in the phone book. He had been honest, reliable, and I always paid him what I owed, even if we got to the site and the date didn’t happen because the guy changed his mind. Still, we weren’t friends, because once a guy knew what I did for a living, he felt a sense of entitlement to my services, especially if he did anything for me. I’m not talking about favors, but if I hired a guy and paid him cash, he still felt entitled to sex. I disagreed, and made enemies by doing so. In fact, my refusal to have sex with him caused him to lead a rampant rumor among other guys I had refused, that my fit body is not a product of exercise but evidence that I was once a man. Had I been the one to die, I doubt he would have spent a lot of mental energy pondering me. Oh, he might have mentioned it to other people to further the rumor because people like to look privy to information that is unknown to others. Gossip is almost another addiction in that it is so very difficult to refuse. He probably would have continued to gossip about me, but beyond that, he would not have cared. (If I take the words he spoke about me as an indication of his opinion of me.)

Aging is terrible but it beats the alternative.

I can’t get the death of one of my detractors out of my mind. Between 2015-2017 I was with three people during their last 24 hours on this earth. These three people mattered to me as individuals and as a part of what’s happening in my life–the introduction to death. Did you, dear Readers, know that death was such a part of life as you get older? I didn’t. I feel blindsided and full of dread. I figured I would tell anyone else who was as clueless as I was so they can be prepared. If preparation for the inevitability of death is truly possible, I don’t know. I guess we shall see.