Ugh, more loss

 My mom called this afternoon. A friend of the family - she is at least 10 years older than my mom - is in the hospital, almost certainly dying. My mom found out because Jo's attorney called her - she was down as a contact person (Jo had almost no family left, and most of her friends are gone). At one time Jo had floated the idea of her as an executor of Jo's estate, but my mom said she couldn't do that. Apparently Jo kept it in the paper work so the attorney wanted my mom to officially sign off saying she was refusing (he was nice enough to bring the papers to the house for her). 

But this is hard. Jo was one of those people I thought of as "always there" and she always had interesting stories - she grew up in the UK and was at one of the boarding schools there during the war, she talked once about how they were given "mystery fowl" to eat at meals and she suspected it was rook (a relative of crows and ravens). She also talked about rationing and what a relief it was once that was lifted. She married an older man and came to the US, did her doctoral work. For years, she taught in my dad's department. (She was already widowed when we knew her). 

Some years we invited her for Christmas dinner - those were the years my dad made an effort to buy "crackers" (those tubes you pull and that have a prize, a paper crown, and usually a bad pun in them) because she had talked about having them at Christmas "back home." 

She was very literary, she had a lot of books and would often pass along books she thought we would be interested in. She also had Sources and found unusual items to give for gift-giving. I remember once she gave us Kendal Mint Cake (or a very similar product), which is basically a giant sugar cube flavored with mint (I think she said mountain climbers carried it for quick energy). 

She had a lovely little house, I remember when we would visit I would look around the big open area (a big front window/living room flowing into a dining area, with a small galley-type kitchen off of it) and thinking about how it would be nice to live in a house like that, especially with the big front windows that looked over the quiet cul-de-sac she lived on. She loved birds and had feeders out, and got her backyard designated as a wildlife area sort of thing.

And now, I suppose that house will be sold - though first all her books and furniture and her various souvenirs of the UK will have to be disposed of somehow, I suppose there will be an estate sale or something. And again everything changes - when I would go up to visit my parents she would either come to visit, or later, when she got older and more fragile, my mom and I would go visit her, and now that won't happen again.

I don't like this. Oh, I know it comes to each one of us, and Jo had a good long life (she is probably 96 right now; I think though it's unlikely she'll pull through based on what my mom said - apparently it was something like a stroke?). But I especially don't like this now, after eighteen months that just feel like loss upon loss.

And yes, it awakens again my old fears of what I call, for lack of a better term, "abandonment" - that the people I love will all die (or leave and become inaccessible) and I will be left all alone, and I seem to have a hard time making friends now. And of course it's much, much worse in the pandemic, where I'm not going out and seeing people or doing things, and we don't really have things like people coming to visit church. And so I find myself thinking gloomily of some time when I am left all alone with no one to talk to, and I think of those old women I knew from church who would buttonhole anyone they could find who would listen to them, and even though what they were saying was not of that much interest to me, and it was pretty much a monologue rather than a conversation, I listened, because I told myself "they have no one to listen to them" and I realize: I am going to be one of those old women.

And it makes me profoundly sad. I mean, it's PARTLY my own fault for not being more social and outgoing in my 20s and 30s; maybe I would have found a soulmate and maybe I would have had kids and I wouldn't be at that same risk of alone-ness. But also, I do think it's something a little broken in our culture that this happens to so many people.

But yes, I still worry that once the pandemic is over, people with nuclear families will look around and go "you know, we're good, we don't need any more people in our lives" and people like me will be left...all alone. And it's hard for the alone people to find each other some times, and also, frankly, some of us are strange enough that we probably wouldn't work out so well as a friend group; we need the leavening influence of someone who DID manage to marry and/or procreate so we don't go spinning off into our own weird orbits so much. 

I mean, I'm *probably* wrong in all of that, but knowing I am *probably* wrong doesn't help with the emotions, and tonight I'm sad, both because of the pending loss and because of the larger pattern it represents.