Untimely Silence

Most folks I loved died when I was in my thirties. Not just people, but our San Francisco bohemian mecca lifestyle, our 365 days and nights celebration turned into an epidemic of waiting and watching and mourning our losses, wondering about possibilities of survival. What could remain for us, for me, for this place? What could become my purpose our purpose for any lonely future of diaspora survivors? My closest friend, a happily married matriarch with two adolescent children, died of breast cancer when I was in my early forties. Perhaps this was my final straw. I have not reconstructed any friendships since. This reminds me of my maternal grandfather, who lived into his eighties but as his quantity of years continued his quality of celebrated convivial life shrank through loss of two wives and all their friends, his generation of neighbors, and then his hearing. He told me not long before he passed he was not sure if his loss of hearing was a curse or a blessing, prohibiting him from cultivating renewing friendships only to be lost yet again. My own hearing is not perfect yet I seem unwilling to listen for any more friends, loved ones I could no better afford to lose than those already gone. Yet still I wonder about therapeutic reasons for my survival. As fertile celebrations fade to dusty memory, my capacity to comprehend why I still breathe, yet my generation of intentional families has long passed, shrunk to incomprehensible mystery as did my revered grandfather's hearing. The best I can hear, through this epidemic distance, I rescued by adoption then by love four hurt children no one else wanted, and each continues teaching me how to love hims and her, when I listen well, in their distinctive needy ways and broken means. Yet even here with these final four I night sweat in guilty worry about how they could best thrive when I can, at last, no longer hear them, nor they me. Most folks I loved died when I was young, leaving me to wonder severed prospects for survival.