The Orphan Club

The whole damn thing that I meant to get to, in that long post about death, was the orphan club. Once you lose a parent, you join the orphan club, and death is never that far away from you again. You connect with other people on the weirdest things.

For me, it will forever be the memory of arranging my father's funeral - before he was dead. My younger brother and I were sitting in the funeral home, waiting for the funeral guy to show up, and when he did, took his seat behind his desk, and said, in his total funeral voice, I'm so sorry, when did your father pass? It was all I could do not to break into a) manic laughter and b) total Monty Python: He's not dead yet! I couldn't look at my brother because I knew the same damn scene was playing itself out in his head, and I knew if I looked at him I would be lost, we would both dissolve into hysterical laughter, and, obviously, you can't do that in a funeral home. But there we were, arranging a funeral for somebody who was still clinging, albeit tenuously, to this mortal coil.

My friend D, whose mother is dying, is in this boat right now.

Maybe it's just possible that objectively things are a bit bleak around me at the moment. Perhaps overdrinking is, in fact, a rational response to my current environment. Go figure.