Obituaries are increasingly failing at their main task, when someone younger than me dies, they're supposed to explain carefully, but indirectly, why whatever happened to them can't happen to me.
Anyway, when the cousin who was closest in age to me died, that was rough. Probably worse for her kids though.
My uncle used to be very amused by my grandparents' habit of reading the obituaries in the paper over breakfast and, when it was someone they knew, having a conversation along the lines of "Oh, I see [person] has died." "Really? But they were just our age!" ("Our age" being "early eighties")
I suspect he may be less amused now that he's in his early eighties himself. I haven't asked.
During covid, I started reading the obituaries from my hometown. I've kind of stopped since.
Well fuck. A sixth person - who I am closer to, the guy who's been the department chair since I got here in 2006 - is now on hospice care. He was also on my mind as I wrote the post, and I suspected things weren't going well, but now it's confirmed.
I'm sorry to hear that. Hospice is rough.
I agree memorial services have replaced funerals, cremation has replaced burial, and around me, rear window decals have replaced gravestones. Yesterday I saw a rear window decal not for a child lost too soon but for a couple who'd lived full lives, born in the late 30s, probably the parents of the owner of the car. When I first saw window stickers with names and dates they seemed a bit crass? Not up to the dignity of the situation? But then I thought that compared to 100 years ago, when visiting a graveyard might be a very regular part of peoples lives, reminding them of those they'd lost on a given sunday or maybe just while walking through town, these days something on your car is going to be a much more effective public memorial. I think they work.
I have not seen any decals like that! It must be semi-regional?
I've seen them here. Not in my neighborhood, at least not parked in a driveway, but in nearby suburbs.
Apparently, everyone who dies in traffic accidents is Christian. I've never seen any marker on a roadside memorial except a cross. Possibly that's why the best local driving school is "Cindy Cohen."
Val Kilmer was not old enough to be dead now.
Is this what getting older is like?
Yes, it is. You do get less rattled (or at least I have, anyhow), just because the attrition gets so frequent. What does remain unsettling at this age is how much more often it's people younger than you than older.
Parts of it are better. Because of IMDB, when you see someone in a movie and think you recognize them from an episode of Family Ties, you can look it up.
1: My 'favorite' is the euphemism "died suddenly at home." Usually that means suicide, but sometimes drug overdose.
I can't think of deaths of anyone close to me in the past 5 years like that, so I guess I'm lucky. Cassandane's sort-of-aunt died in that time frame, but she was old before I met her, so it doesn't feel the same. However, two particular things have made me feel my age in recent years:
1. Watching my parents and in-laws age. My mom and Cassandane's dad are both noticeably more frail and forgetful. I'm seeing it a little myself and hearing about it a lot more from family members who see them more regularly than I do.
2. Personal injuries/excesses that I wouldn't even have noticed 10+ years ago are much bigger problems now. I took a trip to the ER in February, and after two doctors' appointments, we've eliminated every possible cause other than the fact that I had a third beer the night before.
I've never seen any marker on a roadside memorial except a cross.
The kind of roadside memorial I'm most familiar with are ghost bikes.
Morphologically, a bicycle is just a deformed cross.
we've eliminated every possible cause other than the fact that I had a third beer the night before.
Ok wait, this is hilarious. What were your symptoms, if that's not too personal? Were you a losing basketball team rookie?
I can still have 6-8 drinks (with food, over a few hours), walk home, and not feel very bad after 8 hours of sleep. But I can't do it more than once a week without risking horrible gastric pain.
17: a coworker had a brother who gave up his car to buy an e-bike. Unfortunately, he was hit by a car. Luckily he survived, but with a lot of broken bones. And since the automobile took off, and there's no e-bike insurance, he had to pay the deductible and coinsurance. He works as a janitor for a hospital and part -time as a janitor for Boston public schools. He's out on medical leave but the school system won't take him back if there are any medical restrictions.
He got a bill for $6k. As much as I think cycling is a good thing, outside of Davis, CA, commuting by bike is not a risk I'm willing to take.
10: If I die in a car crash on one of those highways, being memorialized by a cross will be my third biggest problem. My second biggest problem will be that I'm dead. My biggest problem will be that being unbaptized, I'm condemned for eternity to roast in hell.
19: I fell and hit my head. Going into more detail than that would be, yeah, kind of personal.
21: One 16-ounce bottle followed by two 20-ounce cans, if I remember correctly.
There are various roadside markers in my city for people who died there, I assume as pedestrians, filled up with photos, flowers, Mary candles, etc. Some of them have persisted in place for over a year.
I always assumed the memorials were for people who drove off the road. Except for the ghost bikes.
And also except for the ones for the people who drowned in their car.
My biggest problem will be that being unbaptized, I'm condemned for eternity to roast in hell.
Ah, but if you've been virtuous, you'll make it to Limbo, and that isn't a very high bar to clear.
This is salient to me because I'm sitting in a hospital at my 86-year-old father's bedside. He's not actually very sick right now, and we're expecting him to leave the hospital in good order in a few days, but at this age being in the hospital at all is a worry.
20: I don't have the gastric pain, but three drinks means an almost guaranteed hangover now and two can be a problem. It's maddening, because all of my habits around being out with friends for the evening involve having another drink at intervals for a few hours, and it just isn't the same without it. I do end up just suffering through the hangovers sometimes, but I hate it.
31: Thanks -- he's snoozing happily right now, and hasn't been meaningfully distressed by the whole thing.
Are you drinking a glass of water with every drink?
Maybe the water is giving me gastritis? I should stop drinking water for a week.
Yeah, hydration doesn't solve it. I also get much drunker than I used to off a few drinks -- I think my liver has just decided that it's not processing alcohol the way it used to. Irksome, given that alcohol is one of my top favorite mind-altering drugs, probably second best after caffeine.
Best wishes to you and your dad LB
18: Topologically, only if it's a step-through bike. The others are coffee cups.
But if unimaginative is commemorated just with a decal how will anyone know to pray for him?
What I notice about hangovers more now is that after any direct nausea or headaches are gone, I'm cognitively worse for a solid day.
(He says, feeling it right now, having just consumed probably the equivalent of five pints at a cask festival last night).
I was surprised they only had a memorial for my dad. He hadn't belonged to any congregation for many years, but it still felt off.
Oh, is that the distinction? Funeral : Memorial :: Graveyard : Cemetary?
Since I lost my mom young, I've always had death as a possibility, but the last 1.5 years have been much worse. My wife lost her Dad and Stepdad, both in February -- a real wake up call. My brother lost his wife the previous January - she was the same age as my wife, which was a bit chilling. (It also provoked the defensive wish definitions about her traits versus my wife's for projected health, in a pale semblance of control/explanation.)
My wife's dads were both standard funerals, but my SIL was cremated, eventually released into the sea a few months later on the sly.
17,22: My wife signed up for bike insurance when she bought her fancy bike last year, specifically because of the gap in insurance for bicyclists. It's a very odd loophole - on your bike, you're usually covered by your car insurance, which doesn't work well if you've successfully removed your need for a car. She's also been wearing a GoPro on her commutes, exactly because there are so many hit and runs of bicyclists.
Oh, is that the distinction? Funeral : Memorial :: Graveyard : Cemetary?
If you mean one is explicitly a religious ceremony with some sort of minister or equivalent, while memorial is just something organized by the family to their tastes and customs, yes. (For example, a wake is a kind of memorial, I would say?)
I think some people might do a small religious funeral upon burial, and a bigger non-religious memorial at a venue - sort of like the wedding ceremony/reception distinction. My family had a big memorial and a small burial, both secular.
I'm not sure that's the distinction made in graveyard/cemetery though - Highgate Cemetery is famously secular. Cemetery is just the hoity-toity word.
Oh wait, that may not be right about Highgate. It's not affiliated with a church, it was a private venture, but most of its ground is consecrated, and a minority chunk not, because of 19th century DEI. Still, Wikipedia agrees with me about the cemetery/graveyard distinction.
I thought cemeteries were secular. This distinction was discussed at a city council meeting at least.
I used to favor a pyre for myself, but increasingly I'm leaning toward the vultures.
I don't think "graveyard" connotes religion either.
OK, it does sometimes.
The term graveyard is often used interchangeably with cemetery, but a graveyard primarily refers to a burial ground within a churchyard.
Funerals have an impetus to get the body in the ground. Memorials can be built around people's schedules, for example pushed into a nicer time of year. When the deceased is cremated anyway, memorials make a bit more sense.
We went with a memorial for my dad. He threw parties his whole adult life, so the memorial invitation was for "Sandy's last party". It was a decent party and probably the last big party for many of the attendees. Made me wish I had a live band at more of my parties.
The new thing post-cremation is natural burial, by the way. My dad is just under the ground in some typical woody/brushy land in the Hill Country.
Post-cremation in the sense of "cremation is so last decade," not in the sense of what you do with the cremains.
The cheapest thing is still internment in a stolen car that is pushed into the river.
The interaction between me and minivet is funny because it implies Minivet assumed I got the parts of the analogy mixed up. Which, fair. That's the kind of thing I would scramble.
You can be buried in Wyuka Cemetery in Lincoln. There's a guy who inspired a Springsteen song there.
Wyuka is nicer than the Catholic graveyard across the street, at least in terms of trees and grounds.
I just thought I had expressed myself with inclarity.
I sleep worse than I used to, if I have more than 2 drinks. But I sleep worse than I used to if I don't have any drinks, too, about half the time.
I also feel hungover whether or not I drank anything the night before, probably a third of the time. So I just drink when I want to and assume I will feel like shit later. Oh well!
Five people who were between medium-close and old-friend-but-not-close-anymore have died in the past 3 years, but I only went to one memorial. People in Montana don't get interpreters unless you ask, and asking someone to spend money on an interpreter for a memorial feels weird most of the time.
it seems less weird to me? Asking people to spend money about being happy is easier than asking people to spend money about being sad. and everyone is always hemorrhaging cash on weddings anyway.
If you meant, is asking someone to spend money on a wedding at a memorial weird, then yes, I think that's even weirder than asking them to get an interpreter.
25: That's not "three beers" according to the standard medical definition, which is three 5% 12-ounce beers. (I've been very disciplined about counting lately.)
And yeah, I have had similar experiences to the one that you describe -- always in the morning. I've never injured myself, but several times I would have fallen in the absence of something to grab onto.
It's my belief that the episodes have been triggered by as little as three beers (or actually, mild episodes have followed as little as zero beers) and I have a theory that it's primarily a result of a lack of hydration (and hence much more likely when I've been drinking).
But of course the other key contributing factor is the one you mention: age. This has only happened to me in the past few years.
I also feel hungover whether or not I drank anything the night before, probably a third of the time.
Yes, in recent years I have taken to asking myself in the morning, "Jesus, how much did I drink last night?" and the answer is often, "Nothing."
65.2: That's what I should have meant.
It's too dark for me to read the alcohol level of my beer. The bartender is frantically trying to buy a car before the tariff makes it unaffordable.
Funerals are usually planned in much less time than weddings too. Even weddings where the bride is pregnant.
Do the kids still have weddings where the bride is pregnant?
it's not a REAL memorial unless you have at least two weddings AND an ASL interpreter
I remember at my dad's wake, his cousin decided to tell the story of a double date he went on with my dad in Utah in like 1958. I'm not sure where that story was appropriate for, but a wake wasn't it.
The moral of the story was that my dad taught him how to respectfully make out with women who were being judged by Mormons. Or similar.
65 is unfortunate because there's more going on at a funeral that you want to hear - at a wedding, it's all written down in the order of service anyway.
I appreciate this thread. My mother opted for medically assisted death in January facing encroaching dementia, and that is the last of my & my wife's parents to go. I feel more generationally "next up."
But mostly, I want to second LB's ranking way back:
Irksome, given that alcohol is one of my top favorite mind-altering drugs, probably second best after caffeine.
I, too, experience disrupted sleep from >2 drinks in a way that I never used to. And I miss my once highly functional liver. I've backed way off on coffee, as well.
78.last: I now have a FitBit thing that records my sleep quality and it is noticeably worse if I've had even a couple of drinks the evening before. But that may always have been the case. I think a lot of what I thought of as a hangover has always been simply lack of decent sleep.
re: 78 and 79
Yes, if I look at my Apple watch, it's the same. Much higher resting heart rate at night after drinking, and poorer HRV. I'm not that fit at the moment as the last bout (5th or 6th, I think) of COVID left me with mild asthma and higher BP, and work, house move, weather, etc has meant I've not had much time to cycle, so my resting pulse is only in the high 50s or low 60s at night--it was high 40s to mid 50s a year ago--but it'll be literally 20 beats higher than normal after a night of drinking. One or two glasses of wine, or 2 pints of beer, won't really nudge it much. But 3 or 4 pints of beer, and there'll be a noticeable difference.
I used to always tell people I was much fitter than I looked--despite being quite overweight--and while there was a certain amount of self-delusion there, it was generally true most of the time. Martial arts, cycling, etc meant my cardiovascular fitness was good, and my lipids and blood pressure and so on were all good.
Last 6 months or so, that hasn't been the case. I still walk a lot and I'm still fairly flexible, so I'm not completely unfit and sedentary, but I am definitely no longer much fitter than I look.
A friend of mine from kickboxing just died, which was a real shock. He was in his early 60s, I think, but a totally larger than life character. Incredibly fit and athletic. A huge, wild character like something from a novel. A background in bare-knuckle boxing in fairgrounds, petty crime. A guy who made his way to France and fought in full-contact competitions all over, before it was common, but then he had a kid and became a single father.
He was a single father of a trans kid, and despite being a very working class man from a pretty unreconstructed background, and occasionally given to colourful language himself, he handled that with incredible grace and ended up a really strong ally to LGBT causes as he got older, and lots of my female friends have spoken since his death about how supportive he was to them.
70: Yes, mostly. My family knew a lawyer who once he knew he was sick planned out most of his own funeral. He had been instrumental in getting Richard Holloway to serve as rector of a church in Boston. By the time this man had died, Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh, but it had been arranged in advance that he would preach at the funeral in Boston.
81 I'm very sorry for your loss, ttaM. How wonderful to have known him, he sounds like he was a true mensch.
re: 83
Thanks. I hadn't seen him in about 8 years, so we weren't super-close anymore, although we did keep in touch on social media.
It was really striking how many people had such strong and positive memories of him.
I am for some reason picturing him as played by Brian Blessed.
Being friends with Biohazard at the other place definitely gave me the sense that yes, this is what getting older is like. You just keep watching as more and more of the people you once knew die.
I count that as one of the two big life lessons I learned from Unfogged. The other is that people don't ever really get over the deaths of their parents.
Blume!
Now I feel bad because I haven't learned anything.
I mean, I also met my spouse through Unfogged. That's not a life lesson though.
Some people are really good at befriending younger people. I'm probably not one of them, but I think those people are often happier and more engaged when they're older. So, I'd like to be one.
re: 85
There's a videos of him on Youtube. Basically a big tall skinny guy with a flat-top mullet haircut in lycra.
(old photo of him with his hand raised)
Now I feel bad because I haven't learned anything.
That's why you're still here! Everyone taps out when they've learned the life lessons. I thought I had, but I was wrong so I came back.
ttaM, I found your description of your friend very moving, thank you. I'm sorry for your and everyone's loss of an over the top but loving character like that.
88: Big deal. I met your spouse here too.
I'm not seeing much of this in my life lately. Luckily.
For my son, we kind of did both. Or all three? [Can you believe it's been more than 5 years? I can and can't.] We had a thing at the funeral home out in Oregon: just the two of us, the awful gf, her dad, and her daughter. It didn't make sense to summon people on short notice. Then 5 weeks later, we did a memorial here in Missoula, inviting his and our friends. His came from both coasts, and even had a bit of a reunion. My daughter facilitated/led the discussion, and people had a bunch of things to say. Some artist friends had made a big banner and buttons which we carried in the Day of the Dead parade that same evening.
I was visiting my brother and SIL last weekend, and SIL had recently had a conversation with my mom (91 next month) about her wishes. She doesn't think it's worth flying her ashes to Florida where my dad's ashes are -- and she doesn't believe in any kind of afterlife at all. It's probably a good idea to give one's descendants some kind of guidance. My wishes are illegal, so I'm not writing them down, but I trust my daughter to do the right thing.
Third and fourth (or whatever) the alcohol/aging stuff above.
I have become a total lightweight re: alcohol in old age. I get on the verge of tipsy with 2 beers (and I am a large person) and almost always stop there because of unwanted downstream effects. Disordered sleep being one; in my case it seems to manifest with me awakening a few hours into the night (I suspect when the alcohol gets processed out of the bloodstream) with al most zero chance of getting back to sleep.
I did get legitimately drunk for the first time in years with several friends in late January at an informal wake for democracy. Zero stars, would not recommend.
OP: Is there a degree of acclimation? Do you follow a learning curve and become less rattled by it eventually?
I do think that muddling along here at the age of 71 that I have become somewhat acclimated. In part I have no really had that many friends and acquaintances of my age die recently. It is probably not that accurate but my impression for my friend/peer group is that there were more deaths 15-20 years ago--generally due to aggressive cancers or early heart issues than recently. Probably just that those were more noteworthy due to their relatively young age. Very recently it has been a spate of deaths among parents of friends and family; my parents' last two sibs just recently passed way.
I do occasionally get drawn up short (Val Kilmer for instance) by a celebrity death that I assume is very premature, but turns out n ot to be so much.
I think my mother on the other hand did really take to heart the ongoing loss of friends. In her case she became involved in a lot of civic volunteerism at a fairly young age, and as a result developed a fairly large friend group many of whom were decades older than her. So starting about in her 40s she had a lot of funerals and frequent loss of very good friends. Her standard comment at funerals (and upon hearing of someone's death) "There will be a lot more coming." Usually prompted someone in the family to mildly rebuke her for being morbid, but certainly not me: 1) She was right. 2) Her experience of life. 3) She was not very well-filtered in general (quelle surprise).
"by a celebrity death that I assume is very premature, but turns out not to be so much"
And then there are famous people like Shane MacGowan where you are fairly astonished that they made it to their mid-60s at all.
I always felt/feel like I sleep MORE soundly after drinking than otherwise but maybe it's like less restful somehow or maybe I'm weird.
In an attempt to lighten the mood, can I just say that the title reminds me of when Emmanuel Macron was kicking around the idea of having a big referendum but hadn't decided what it should be about. Some other French pol suggested having two questions, one on bringing back compulsory national service and one on the end of life.
I'm a no on both.
100 really? He just woke up one morning and was like "I'm bored, Klytus. What have you to entertain me today?" And the reply from under his bed was "You could try a referendum? Other countries have them sometimes and they really shake things up. Think of a good question and I'll make it happen."
He should of course have split his country apart by asking "Cuisine au beurre OU... cuisine a l'huile?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cuisine_au_Beurre
(He'd also done it before, going as far as to sound out the printing industry about preparations even before deciding on the question. C'est tout lui: https://www.lejdd.fr/Politique/referendum-les-obstacles-qui-attendent-deja-macron-3852413)
Topologically, is a person on a bicycle a dumpling?
Half person and half bicycle