I didn’t write about this at the time because there was a lot of other stuff going on, but the older sister of one of my best girlfriends from high school died several weeks ago. When I say “older”, I mean 44 years old; would have been 45 this year. I actually thought she was a little bit older than me than just four years, but no, she was 44, and died after a long battle with cancer that I wasn’t even aware was going on, since I don’t live locally and I guess nobody thought to tell me until it was too late.
Our overall gang of gals was pretty large and we all hung out together and with various ones of the other separately, and granted, I went to high school in a small town that was oddly not very cliqueish, so everybody just kinda hung out with everybody. But there were 15 or so of us that were really tight, and then that was further kinda divided into smaller core groups of two to five people.
My little branch was the group of five, you rarely saw one of us without at least one, or more, of the others. And it just so happened that all the other girls in my little core group had one older sister apiece, so I sort of inherited four big sisters by default. Only one of them was I particularly close to, and she is still alive and well and we still see each other once in a while today; but I certainly was fond of all the rest, and all of the older girls not only tolerated all five of us teenagers, but were actually really cool with us and hung out with us quite a bit. We got to go to lots of bachelorette parties, quarters sessions and parties at a lot of the older college crowd’s apartments in Jackson and Martin, “adult”-ish functions like barbecues, and all kinds of other stuff (usually involving a fair amount of underage drinking) thanks to the big sisters.
This one that recently passed away, however, I was always especially fond of because she was just so sweet. Everyone adored her, and you never heard her say a bad word about anyone. Her best friend and former neighbor also worked with my dad for many years, so he knew her pretty well and was fond of her, too. It also just so happened that my high school sweetheart, at the time we started dating, was her brother-in-law, though she had just begun the process of divorcing his older brother then. Still, she and my boyfriend were buddies and remained friendly, so there was that tie to her, too.
A few years ago, the phenomena that has now become an ongoing and continual thing of many of my friends’ parents passing away began. As another friend and I discussed shortly after there had been a one-two-three hit of three parents in a row dying one right after another, we said we guessed we were just getting to that age, and it was likely going to happen more and more.
And so it has, though it really took some getting used to in the beginning, and since has included my own father. With me living far from home and not seeing or being in regular contact with a lot of my friends from home these days, it seems like the only time I talk to or e-mail with some of them is when someone else’s mother or father has died, whether I’ve called or e-mailed to tell them, or vice-versa.
I wasn’t really prepared for a rush of people’s siblings to start passing away, though. I know 40 years old sounds old to some people and, granted, technically it is indeed middle-aged (ugh). And granted, too, I am certainly no stranger to loss, which Kathy T. recently managed to chronicle so well in the latest installment of her Wrinkles series. How she did it, I don’t know, because I am a terrible interview - it’s got to be like listening to a person with the worst case of ADD in the world - but Kathy is an excellent writer/reporter and somehow managed to make sense of all my babbling. There is a REASON why The Lynnster Zone has been “babbling since 1997″, and not “intelligently blogging in clear and concise thought since 1997″, yep.
But I can handle, and have come to expect, news of friends’ parents’ deaths. It’s always sad, but never such an unexpected shock and surprise anymore like it was at first.
People’s brothers and sisters passing away, however, is starting to freak me out a little bit. And much, much worse - someone’s younger sibling passing away - that is freaking me out even more.
Almost all my friends had kid brothers or sisters, many of whom often came over to my house to swim in the pool, or that we took to Opryland with us when we went, or Lisa and I (who saw at least two if not more movies a week) would take along with us to the movies, or my high school sweetheart and I would load up in the back seat and take along to the movies with us.
It was just that way, small-town way I guess. Our friend Angie’s house was on the way to Waverly and the walk-in theater, so we’d drop by on the way out of town (we all practically lived out there anyway), as we did when we were headed over to Waverly to see Sixteen Candles. Ang’s kid sister was having a slumber party that night, they begged to go, so we squeezed a half dozen seventh grade girls into my boyfriend’s car and toted them along.
So the thought of any of my friends’ younger brothers and sisters, all of whom are younger than 40 - these are kids I babysat, took to the movies, fed them peanut butter and jelly and tuna fish sandwiches in the summers when they came over swimming, played countless board and card games with, all kinds of stuff - the thought of something happening to any of them is just terrible and not something I want to see happening. Sure, they’re grownups now. But anything happening to any of them, it just horrifies me and takes my breath away, really.
And so it does.
The other day I flipped thru the Jackson paper’s website, as I usually do most days, and spotted a familiar name in the obituaries. For a second I really didn’t think about it, because the name is kind of a common one, and I thought, “No, can’t be.” But then I glanced at the age, and clicked on the link to the actual obituary that listed family member names and such, and my heart fell.
Honestly, I didn’t know this boy as well as I did many of the others, and while I knew his older brother fairly well - he had dated a girlfriend of mine for some time when she was in high school and he in college - I was not as good friends with him as I was many others in the same general crowd and age group. But yeah, I knew both of the brothers. They were both very nice, and very quiet, guys.
This one particularly bothers me, though, even though I didn’t know him as well as many other friends’ siblings. I spent an entire school year having lunch with this guy, and the memories are not only very clear, but very specific.
My junior year in high school, all five of us girls in my little core group had lunch at the same time that year, so we sat together every day, and early on commandeered on one of the two tables that were in adjoining room to the main room of the school’s cafeteria, a little side room where all the vending machines were. Convenient for me, since I spent most of that year either not eating and having a Coke for lunch, or maybe I’d have a Coke and a Twix bar, or a Whatchamacallit. Or I’d be filling up a cup of water and mixing in Cambridge Diet powder - this was before Slim-Fast - which I didn’t need at the time but thought I did.
I was never a good eater - still not - and the only days I ever ate cafeteria food, usually, was when they were having pizza. I LOVED school pizza. My friend Chris’ mom was a teacher at the elementary school, and she used to buy big boxes of school pizza to keep at home, which I would raid any chance I got an opportunity. That year, he and I were arguing and not on speaking terms more often than not, especially after I threw my drink in his face when he tried to make nice and kiss me on the cheek at midnight on New Year’s, which resulted to full-out war for a few months afterwards. In any case, my access to school pizza outside of school and school hours became severely limited that year, so that’s probably why my hitting people up for their pizza on pizza day in school became so exacerbated. Like a crack addict begging for drugs or money, I was hitting people up for their school pizza.
Then for a while, one of the two arcades in town started buying it from the same place and selling it at the arcade, which was wonderful. If not for school pizza, I’d have starved to death that year, or at least been down to probably 70 lbs. from the 95 lbs. I already was and thought was too fat. Sixteen and seventeen-year-old girl’s brains operate in an entirely alternate reality from the logical and reasonable world most of the time, in case you didn’t know.
Anyway, back to my junior year and lunchtime. We girls shared the table that year with a group of mostly freshman and some sophomore boys, most of whom were football players. We sort of big-sistered them all year long and there wound up being some kinda good fringe benefits for them, because (A) we all had driver’s licenses, and (B) seeing as how my girlfriends and I threw a large number of the outdoor parties every year, they had an in for not only those but other parties around town by virtue of hanging out with us.
Lucky for them it was our junior year, when we had something going on somewhere nearly every night of the week, rather than our senior year, when we all had boyfriends and didn’t have near as much fun as the year before. Anyway, I spent quite a bit of time that year being taxi service for not only my girlfriends who didn’t have cars yet, but a large number of younger guys that hadn’t turned 16 yet, including our lunchtime crew.
Three of those boys were really, really funny and had us cracking up the entire lunch period. A couple of the others were just really good guys.
And then another one who was generally pretty quiet and just listened to all the jokes and babbling and cackling and such at the table and laughed along with us all. But when he did have something to say, it was always really hilarious. He was the one whose older brother moved in my crowd of friends and dated one of my girlfriends.
My near-anorexic habits were always a big joke around the table, but then would come pizza day. I’m pretty sure (because I can think of no other reason why I would have been hounding people every pizza day for their pizza, so it must be true) that they limited everyone to one slice of pizza, probably for fear of running out; otherwise I would have just bought a second slice. Plus we were the first lunch period that year, so they were probably even more strict about it; third period lunch, if there was still plenty left, you probably could have begged and paid for another slice.
In any case, come every pizza day, I was always scoping out who I could maybe talk into giving up their pizza, because even though I ate next to nothing most days, on school pizza day I had to have two slices whether I was really hungry or not, I just loved it so much. I remember always paying special attention those mornings, looking around the halls and in class to see who all had lunch at the same time as me that was sick and not feeling well - because more often than not, somebody who wasn’t feeling well (or hungover, whatever the case might have been) could be easily talked out of their pizza.
The guys I was friends with in my own class that had lunch at the same time sat at another table in the main room of the cafeteria, and they were always greedy with their pizza; unless I got lucky and one of them was sick, they’d see me coming and shoo me away on pizza day before I could even ask. Same with the senior boys, except they’d at least be polite and friendly about it; still, no amount of flirtation or bribes ever got me a single slice of pizza out of that table.
Most of the time I wouldn’t even bother with any of the girls, because too many of them either brought their own lunch or, like me, were on a Coke or Diet Coke diet and weren’t having pizza anyway. Sometimes I could get someone to go through the line for me and get an extra tray, and I’d take the pizza and distribute the rest among the guys at our table. A lot of times I wouldn’t even have to go beg and be a pizza pest; someone would just walk over and voluntarily give theirs up. Yep, that’s how much I loved school pizza.
It was always a fair trade, I’d make it worth their while. You want four bags of potato chips out of the machine for that pizza? Okay, here you go. Two Twix bars and a Dr. Pepper? Right here. Since I worked at the hospital, I always had money and change, which many kids didn’t generally have because they didn’t work, so vending machine bribery was always an option for me. And, I can still tell you today, could make a list of names, of who would never give theirs up without a trade and who would toss me their pizza out of the generosity of their hearts.
I rarely hassled the boys we sat with, because they were mostly pretty big guys, football players, and would often be eating their whole school lunch tray AND a brown bag lunch from home. If one of them was sick (or hungover), sometimes they’d offer on the front end, but I just didn’t bother them otherwise usually. I had my three or four tables in the main cafeteria I’d go hound, and rarely came away emptyhanded.
The one quiet guy at our table was probably the one that most often volunteered his slice, though, and would never accept anything in return, even though he was the biggest guy at the table - not fat, just big, football-player big. He’d push his pizza over to me, then say something hilarious - because like I said, what little he did talk when he managed to get anything in edgewise in the rest of the noise at the table - when he did say something, it was always very, very funny.
Maybe he just wanted to see me eat, as most of those folks at our table were always trying to get me to. Laughing and cracking jokes about it, but there was always kind of acknowledgement of my all-too-apparent budding eating disorder under the surface.
And he was just a nice guy anyway, a really good kid. Not unlike his older brother, who also a very quiet and nice guy, and whom I knew.
So it kind of bothered me the other day to see that this guy, someone else’s kid brother, had passed away. I don’t know what happened - from the way the obituary read, I assume illness of some sort. He was 39, had a wife, some kids, and now he’s gone. Someone else reads the paper and thinks, maybe, it’s sad that this 39-year-old man died.
I read the paper, and for me it’s So-and-So’s little - LITTLE - brother has died. It just seems so not right.
I don’t like it. I don’t like being a grown-up. Not this week.
