![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Sad Speculation
Mar. 17th, 2005 09:01 pmAndre Norton passed away today. Part of me feels like a guilty poser for being upset about this - I never actually knew her. I read her books, true, though she wasn't my absolute favoritest writer ever, but... she wasn't family, or a friend, and there's a voice inside my head wondering if I have the right to grieve for someone that I wasn't close to.
Another part of me is just looking at the list of people who impacted my life in some way that have died in the past year, and boggling at how long it is. I know, intellectually, that more people aren't dying, but somehow it feels like more people that I'm aware of are. Not just family and personal acquaintances, though they've been passing too - but icons, public figures, faces within social circles that have had an impact on my life or the lives of friends. And I wonder, is this what growing up means? Not just recognizing death as something that happens to living things, but acknowledging it as something that shapes the face of your world all the time, even when it happens to people whose lives don't intersect yours directly? Part of it is just simple numbers and passage of time. The older you are, the more likely you are to be aware of people in the public eye, and the more likely those people you notice are to be old enough that dying is a realistic risk. At the same time, though, there's more to it - a kind of realization that, if people who matter die, then people who die matter, if that makes any sense.
It's odd that this kind of realization would take so long to come to me, or that it would take the passing of someone so tangential to my world to make it happen. I handle death on a daily basis. I've taken lives, though admittedly not human lives, and I've helped other people come to terms with grief and death enough that occasionally I have to work at not turning the words into a memorized recitation. I've lost friends and family members, and I've grieved for them - but it was always something that happened to them, that affected me, and that ended there. I never thought about the fact that there were other effects that I didn't see, or conversely that my world and, indirectly, I were being affected by things that were personal tragedies for other people.
I feel incredibly shallow and naive for just noticing this now, and it probably sounds incredibly superficial and shmaltzy to everyone reading this who *is* handling personal tragedy, or who already realized this years ago. Still, it's something I need to think about.
Another part of me is just looking at the list of people who impacted my life in some way that have died in the past year, and boggling at how long it is. I know, intellectually, that more people aren't dying, but somehow it feels like more people that I'm aware of are. Not just family and personal acquaintances, though they've been passing too - but icons, public figures, faces within social circles that have had an impact on my life or the lives of friends. And I wonder, is this what growing up means? Not just recognizing death as something that happens to living things, but acknowledging it as something that shapes the face of your world all the time, even when it happens to people whose lives don't intersect yours directly? Part of it is just simple numbers and passage of time. The older you are, the more likely you are to be aware of people in the public eye, and the more likely those people you notice are to be old enough that dying is a realistic risk. At the same time, though, there's more to it - a kind of realization that, if people who matter die, then people who die matter, if that makes any sense.
It's odd that this kind of realization would take so long to come to me, or that it would take the passing of someone so tangential to my world to make it happen. I handle death on a daily basis. I've taken lives, though admittedly not human lives, and I've helped other people come to terms with grief and death enough that occasionally I have to work at not turning the words into a memorized recitation. I've lost friends and family members, and I've grieved for them - but it was always something that happened to them, that affected me, and that ended there. I never thought about the fact that there were other effects that I didn't see, or conversely that my world and, indirectly, I were being affected by things that were personal tragedies for other people.
I feel incredibly shallow and naive for just noticing this now, and it probably sounds incredibly superficial and shmaltzy to everyone reading this who *is* handling personal tragedy, or who already realized this years ago. Still, it's something I need to think about.
