I've known two people who drowned in the prime of life. Separate incidents.

One of them was a lawyer I traveled with to a client's facility for a week. We weren't close friends or anything, but he and I spent a week traveling together, just the two of us. A couple years later I learned that he had been swept out to sea while swimming at dusk and he got caught in a riptide. My scout troop takes trips to the same beach every year, and even though we have all these safety systems in place, and we're good at managing the risks, I've stopped going on that trip because it scares me too much. Not relaxing at all. The two times I did go, I just stood on the beach counting heads in the surf over and over again for hours.

Second drowning victim is a guy I studied abroad with. Again, not super close, but there were 25 of us on a program together and there were plenty of times that I hung out with him in groups at parties and in class. I read in alumni class notes that he also drowned while on vacation someplace. No details. He would have been in his late 20s.

The only people close to me who have died were older and sick, so while it was heartbreaking, it wasn't a shock.

I will do you a favor by joining the circle when I kick the bucket. When do you want me to go? This year next year? Lets make it after next cuz the guys are planning a meet in NE next fall. I would like to be alive when I go.

when do i want you to die?



any time after I do.




unless you were planning on leaving me more than $1mil. In which case, let's say 5 years.

Well I start my SSI in November for a whopping $1579 a month of which a chunk comes out for Medicare. I took care of my father for 6 years. Every year he got a cost of living increase of 200 bucks, but Medicare increased 180. Still cheap though. The other things you know about will be spent frivolously. If there is anything left you can have it.

Well, I'll be stoned very shortly, but, hopefully, not dead.

Shit that number's harder to calculate than I thought it would be.

I stopped counting at 31.

This thread has stuck in my mind these past several days and I guess that is OK.
I don't intend to make a formal list, but I have a pretty good idea who is on it so far and it grows in fits and starts at an alarming rate, usually with an "Damn, how could I have missed ..."

I am currently carrying easily a hundred RIP's around.

I count 17, not counting my great grandmother, who died when I was about three.
Both parents about a year apart, most of my aunts and uncles, who don't count either because they hated on me and thus don't count as human beings in my book, five good friends, two by their own hand (fatal illnesses), one sudden stroke (preventable, had she asked me for advice/help), one auto accident and one murdered. The rest of various maladies and old age.

I also made a very short list of three who I wish would hurry up and die already. No details available due to high classification levels.

It's not so much the number of people I've known who've died but that in nearly every case the person had died and for one reason or another I was not informed of it until much later in most cases, or a few days in other cases.

It left me with a really warped conception of death. I most cases I went about my day thinking that the person was alive and I would be planning to see them or I'd be writing them a letter that I intended to send, or just had the idea, "I should get in touch with them and see how they are doing."

So, I found out they had died, sometimes months earlier, but in my mind they were still alive and only a phone call away.

It leaves me thinking that people actually only exist in my mind.


https://www.theonion.com/world-death...ent-1819564171

It's all we have to work with so there it is.

If you're not holding their hand they belong to Schrodinger.

I was recently surprised to learn that a friend from school, who created the USB bus, had died.

I cut this cartoon out years ago. It illustrates foot's dilemma.

https://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I0000df.qqq60P2w

Not so funny was the experience soldiers often had in Vietnam: Your buddy was wounded and evacuated. Whether he died or was sent home, it was likely that one's feeling of loss was the same.

I would guess it's a lot, but then again I have no scientific evidence of that. I've always liked the phrase, "to know death, is to fully know life."

I've said it for a long time now, Death is part of Life.