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- At the coffee shop, I've got a day or two's worth of work to do today. To ensure that I don't spend the day writing about myself, I left my paper journal at home. I am circumventing this by typing in my online diary. I found out last night that a girl I knew growing up died of the flu on Friday. They took her to the health clinic on Wednesday and she was doing okay but then got worse Thursday night. They airlifted her to a hospital in another city but she died Friday morning. I don't remember too much about her but know the pictures that were taken. She liked me and always asked my parents about me whenever she saw them. She was on disability, had cerebral palsy or something, not sure - but she was healthy, and just two weeks ago had spent the afternoon at my parents' house. I feel very sad and hopeless about it - 28 years old, got sick, and that's it. What's the point of life again? How can a funeral do any justice to a person's life? I know they're for the living and not the dead but it seems so ineffectual and trite, almost. You're born, you live, you do things and think things and feel things, and then you die and the final statement about you is given during some hour-long get-together during which people look at pictures of you and talk about you like they knew you? They sum you up in a two-minute speech and then everyone goes home? If I send a note to her parents, what in the world would I even say? They aren't the ones I should send the note to anyway - it should go to her. This isn't even anything unique - people die of the flu by the thousands every year, every month - always have, always will. Suddenly I'm upset about it and having to grapple with issues of life and death because it's someone I used to know? I feel very bad and am sitting in a coffee shop getting tears on the keyboard of my laptop. I feel like a huge brat. I don't need to worry about myself because I am lucky, ridiculously lucky - I am healthy and educated and reasonably intelligent and driven and I have a supportive family and good friends and good hygiene and plenty of other things that I'm not even aware of and take for granted. My checking account balance is four figures right now and Wednesday is another payday. I don't know what I'll be doing in two months and I don't know where I'll be and I don't know what's going to happen but I really don't need to worry because I'll be fine. There are plenty of people who don't have the incredible advantages I have and they manage. I can manage too. It's beautiful today, really beautiful. Those weather gods, they like to be funny. I guess I should be glad.
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