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nyykiAnd another one falls.
A friend of mine, LS, had a hard life. Her dyslexia made her reserved and standoffish as a kid, out of fear of getting ridicule. That’s when we first encountered each other, back in second grade. We got to be friends in high school, and closer friends since then, but by that time she had serious bone degeneration problems in her hips and lower spine – on good days she could use a walker. But whatever brings bodily dysfunction wasn’t done with her, because she suffered from heart trouble too, and her kidneys started throwing error codes too. She wound up on dialysis, and contact with her became scarce.
LS left the planet on June 2 – I found out yesterday. It was a long shot, her getting better, but it didn’t hit the target. We talked on the phone about how great it’d be to have someone to watch movies with, then talk about them afterward, or to have that close time sharing it with someone else (like me, she was a refugee from the Love Wars).
RIP, my friend, you fought long and hard to keep going but some fights aren’t meant to be won, and you did manage to stay around long enough to get your ND son through high school and into college. LS, you will be missed, but your suffering won’t. And I’m glad that’s no longer affecting you.
I’m down to one seriously ill person I know – he’s fighting cancer, along with his own social ineptitude and lack of emotional intelligence. He managed to hurt a mutual friend of ours with his words on Saturday evening, and I’m back on acquaintance protocols regarding him because I refuse to be his emotional tampon. He’s losing weight, which is a bad sign for a cancer patient, especially because he doesn’t have much to lose. So it won’t surprise me one bit if I get a call before the end of the year that he’s gone. From my perspective he’s been a type of intellectual sponge – he reads all the time, but he doesn’t use what he reads for anything. He’s a collector of records, CD’s, guitars, movies, and several other things, but he doesn’t gain any insights from any of that and he doesn’t play out – he already resigned himself to never performing in front of an audience ever again. I think it’s sad. He liked to think of himself as a renaissance man, but he dabbled around, not producing anything completed save for a poem cycle and a novel. (I have copies of both) I hate that his life isn’t what he desired it to be, but he didn’t put in the work, so I think he carries some of the responsibility for that.
The thing I struggle with is if I’ll miss him. I can’t answer that.
A friend of mine, LS, had a hard life. Her dyslexia made her reserved and standoffish as a kid, out of fear of getting ridicule. That’s when we first encountered each other, back in second grade. We got to be friends in high school, and closer friends since then, but by that time she had serious bone degeneration problems in her hips and lower spine – on good days she could use a walker. But whatever brings bodily dysfunction wasn’t done with her, because she suffered from heart trouble too, and her kidneys started throwing error codes too. She wound up on dialysis, and contact with her became scarce.
LS left the planet on June 2 – I found out yesterday. It was a long shot, her getting better, but it didn’t hit the target. We talked on the phone about how great it’d be to have someone to watch movies with, then talk about them afterward, or to have that close time sharing it with someone else (like me, she was a refugee from the Love Wars).
RIP, my friend, you fought long and hard to keep going but some fights aren’t meant to be won, and you did manage to stay around long enough to get your ND son through high school and into college. LS, you will be missed, but your suffering won’t. And I’m glad that’s no longer affecting you.
I’m down to one seriously ill person I know – he’s fighting cancer, along with his own social ineptitude and lack of emotional intelligence. He managed to hurt a mutual friend of ours with his words on Saturday evening, and I’m back on acquaintance protocols regarding him because I refuse to be his emotional tampon. He’s losing weight, which is a bad sign for a cancer patient, especially because he doesn’t have much to lose. So it won’t surprise me one bit if I get a call before the end of the year that he’s gone. From my perspective he’s been a type of intellectual sponge – he reads all the time, but he doesn’t use what he reads for anything. He’s a collector of records, CD’s, guitars, movies, and several other things, but he doesn’t gain any insights from any of that and he doesn’t play out – he already resigned himself to never performing in front of an audience ever again. I think it’s sad. He liked to think of himself as a renaissance man, but he dabbled around, not producing anything completed save for a poem cycle and a novel. (I have copies of both) I hate that his life isn’t what he desired it to be, but he didn’t put in the work, so I think he carries some of the responsibility for that.
The thing I struggle with is if I’ll miss him. I can’t answer that.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-02 12:47 am (UTC)You may not miss him as much as you do your friend LS, but whether he knows he is probably dying or not, cancer has a lot of inflammation marker changes and the concomitant irritability which that causes going along with it. I am not saying to trust him to not say wack shit, I’m just saying, maybe cancer is a good enough reason to freak the fuck out and not have that used to judge someone’s actions like that out-freakery is all that they are capable of.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-02 01:02 am (UTC)The real problem is that he's been this way as long as I've known him, and that's a long time -- over 40 years.
He was going at being a renaissance man from the angle of being someone who could be known for doing multiple things, not all of them art. I think he got in his own way about that. I also think renaissance persons get that way by doing, not talking about it or sort of doing but not completing a lot of things.