It has been three weeks since Christine Grundoon passed away, and I am ready to write a little bit of what I think. Well, as ready as I ever will be.
When she actually passed away, I didn't really have anything to say. I thought that loud protestations of grief would be inappropriate. Because grief isn't exactly what I was feeling. I didn't lose a wife, I didn't lose a sister. I lost someone who I had known for a decade, who I was familiar with at a distance, but it was a different sort of loss for me.
I am saying this because I imagine that the median age here being what it is, quite a few of you are in the same position as I am. I am thirty two years old now. I have had a number of people I know pass away, from embolism and ALS and suicide, and I have had varying degrees of preparation for these things, and they have happened to people who I had varying amounts of closeness to, but each time, my reaction has not been out-and-out wailing grief, but rather a type of numb shock. Wait, really? Her? But we were playing frisbee like, ten weeks ago! It was just a nice warm nice day, playing frisbee! No one I have been very close to has died. I can still, like probably many of the people here my age, explain the entire thing away as an exception, not a rule. A while before I have to start taking such a thing seriously.
The last time I saw Christine was at HD 6, which was a good time for us, although not a time when I got to really talk to anyone at great length about serious matters. Which is kind of the point exactly, that when I go back and try to recapture images of that time...all of us circling around in loose gaggles, talking about the most inconsequential of subjects, and we could just kind of take it for granted that this situation would continue on forever.
I don't know if I am explaining this very well. This isn't my time to explain things very well.
So to me, this is how I feel...a sense of shock and unreality. Like many people my age, I kind of take it for granted that the adults will always be around, in the background, to fix things up. (And probably the biggest loss that we as a community have with Christine's death is that we lost an ADULT! We lost a storehouse of maturity and good judgment! And goodness knows, that isn't something we have a great big surplus of). But what I learned, yet again is that all the pieces of my background, all the little pieces of my world that I just depend on to be there, won't always be there.