Thanks guys. I didn’t write that for sympathy and I’m ok. It’s just a way of sharing some thoughts and dealing with it. My mother is the one who feels this deeply. She’d been dealing with my sister’s mental health issues for years already. I don’t like that term, mental health issues, or I don’t like the way it’s casually applied at least–it can be rather lazy–but it fits if you can’t explain things further.
Maybe it’s because I moved around a lot as a child but I have trouble living in one place for so long – in the sense that the place accumulates too many memories and it’s hard to go somewhere without remembering that this that or the other happened, and maybe cannot happen any more. Maybe a longer life is like that a little bit, in that you can be tortured by recurring memories. My mother already had symptoms of that and this’ll probably exacerbate it. I will try to keep in touch with her more – we’ve always had more of a brother-sister relationship anyway given how I grew up.
I had to take a train to visit my friend on Wed night to register in his city. He had just come back from his grandmother’s funeral, and told me how he thinks his grandfather will now slow down and age quickly because he no longer has to take care of his wife. You hear stories like these, where people die within days or hours of each other, from separation, from the weight of sadness on their heart. It’s true, it’s one possibility.