Dichroic Reflections

too late

You know what really sucks? What really sucks is when, out of idle curiosity, you follow a link from one blog to another, and find that the writer of the second one is wise, compassionate and interesting. Well, OK, that part doesn't suck. The sucky thing is when the whole reason the link was posted was to note that the writer of the second blog has died, and there will never be any more conversation to be had there.

This isn't the first time I've learned how how much I would have liked someone online, only when it's too late. Sometimes, it's been someone who touched so many lives they're mentioned in numerous blogs all over the net. Somehow it bothers me more than finding out a favorite author is dead. Maybe that's because I don't usually find out so more immediately - more often, the author died long before I ever heard his or her name - but I think it's more a matter of expectation. I expect to converse with an author mainly through his or her books, and I expect that conversation to be about the characters and only peripherally about the author. (Maybe that even applies to autobiographies. I don't know.) In a journal, though, it's a real life - or a part of one - that I'm reading, so when it's ended it's much more of a shock. (Clearly, authors I've met in real life fall into the latter class.)

By any reasonable measure short of great advances in geriatrics, I'm past the first third of my life now, but I confess to still being young enough that death doesn't still feel real to me. I've seen a few dead and dying bodies and heard the final thud of earth falling on people I love, but I still have a hard time with the concept of a person ceasing to be. I don't know if that's cause or effect for the fact that I still feel my grandparents, the ones I've lost that I was closest too, near around me whenever I think of them. By definition, since you can never really know anyone else from inside, I suppose in a real way they are around me whenever I think of them, just as I interacted with my images of them rather than themselves when they were alive. The difference is that I can't learn anything new about them now, except through other people.

Maybe that's why it hurts to learn about a new person only after they've died. After all, I had all the love and more time to spend with my grandparents than most people get. When I was born, there were seven of them when I was born and the first of the four I was closest to didn't die until I was in college. (It occurs to me now that my brother, four years younger, was comparatively gypped.) But with a new person, one I haven't met before, when I begin to learn about them, like what I see and want to know more, if they've died there will never be any chances to learn and like them better.