  Tonight Brad returns home from SanFran with tons of souviners in tow. He is coming in with his family from St. Louis. Tyler has quit his job at Corning Percision Lens along side his Dad and my mother learned that one of her friends from work died in a car crash today, and people made a make-shift memorial by displaying the picture of her and her husband she had on her desk in a prominent position. So goes the world forward..... Shocking that I remain in it. I think it dawns on everyone eventually that even with everything they see going on in the world and with their friends and family they are still here, still alive and in survivors guilt brought on by MSNBC.
What a task to even live now a days, with constant pursuit by cancer, heart disease, alzheimers, obesity, car wrecks, and ofcourse... strokes. Now comes the reports that fried foods cause cancer, and the World Health Organization having emergency meetings to discuss the issue. In 1955 when they first released the fact that smoking causes lung cancer, the Surgeon General had the reporters go into the auditorum and then they bolted the doors shut so no one could walk out after hearing the news without first watching the evidence. I suspect the same with fried foods. I suspect the same thing with cellphones, negative thoughts, and wireless Wi-Fi.
I can't imagine this thing on my desk can shoot out 2.5 Ghz worth of 10 MB / sec data without giving me a sunburn on my right side or making my teeth fillings able to login to Yahoo! without my knowledge. I joke about the risk of life only to ensure that it dosen't sink in too deep. The blinders we wear prevents us, like animals, from seeing our own demise. We posses knowledge of it, of course, but then we chose to purge it and bury it because life simply requires us to live forever and even though we don't it shouldn't interfere with our business or pleasure. Society requires routine, routine suggest wastefullness, and wastefullness is more tolerable when we have a lot to waste. Sudden death of a loved causes great grief, when it just a work friend or aquantence we feel something else. Because it relates to death, of which we wish to have no part, we dismiss it as well, and allow only sadness to hammer into us.
But what we don't allow ourselves to feel is the waste. The waste of a life. Media helps us not think about it with it's quick coverage. The above mentioned incident was reported thusly at urlLink WLWT.com : " A passenger in Reynolds' car, Kimberly Reynolds, 33, was pulled from the car and taken to University Hospital, where she later died, WLWT reported. Anthony Reynolds was treated at University Hospital for minor injuries and released. A child who was riding in Reynolds' car, Christopher Starks, 11, was treated for minor injuries at Children's Hospital and released, WLWT reported. " Quick wasn't it? It even mentioned Kimberly Reynolds, 33, as a "passenger in Reynold's car".... so sterile.... even though they were both plainly married as they both have the same last name!
However this is nothing more than something to re-inforce our blinders to dealth and wastefullness. Let me tell you what really happened: Kim was a fun woman who had many friends. She worked in "files" filing away at a government job and having to talk to my mother often. She sat right behind my mother's best friend, who would talk with her often. She had an 11 year old son and a husband, the above mentioned driver who had also just recently lost his father. That day they were going to pick Kim up from work because they were going to classes on how to buy a house, and they wanted to be prepared. She usually took the bus from work, but this time her husband went to pick her up to make it to class.
My mother told her goodnight as she made her rounds before going outside. If someone would read her life, the fact that she filed all day and was working on buying a house for her family would certainly give another woman, 33, pause. If we heard the details of everyone's life so laid out for our understanding, "one day she was here and now she's gone", how would we change? We get an ear full of whoever the media chooses to focus on, one person usually, missing or dead.... and it gets drilled into us until we don't want to see anymore.
But what about a steady stream of stories, from normal middle class people, dying, and the tragic fallout. The lives changed. Maybe we can't capture that, maybe we can only experience it ourselves. My mother is experiencing that now. Again, not losing a mother or a son, but just an aquantance, just "never see her again", just "ended suddenly"... no grief to get in the way of the fact of death, just death, individual and alone... like ours will be to others who do not love us.
We will be passed by, thought about, displayed, and then gone. You can't be upset, they have to forget about you, you have to fade into memory and be remanded into a "remember you know who" at parties years from now. They can't be bothered by contemplation, they are living forever... it was just unfortunate that you didn't.... that's all. You were pulled from the car and taken to University Hospital, where you later died, and WLWT reported it. 
