Losing friends

Yesterday, we got some terrible news. A man we know very well was killed in a car accident
Sunday at the age of 58. His brother was driving and survived with injuries but Billy did not
make it. We are stunned. Tim has known him for over 30 years and he owns a delicatessen
in our town that we go to often. Tim and I get in arguments often when he is driving. I
do not like long car trips and am a worry wart through and through and Tim does not drive
as carefully as I would like. Despite his MM diagnosis, he still goes through his life thinking
bad things won't happen to him. I, unfortunately, have had so many cruddy things happen to me, that I expect the worst all the time. NJ has such busy roads with scads of obnoxious drivers
and the cell phone issue just makes it more dangerous these days. I am paranoid of the time when Olivia is old enough to drive and told Tim yesterday that I think we should move to a more rural area when that time comes. About 5 or 6 years ago, we were going to so many wakes
that our neighbors couldn't believe it. We live 2 blocks from the most popular funeral parlor in our area and it seemed like Tim and I were always walking down the street in our black clothes with our neighbors seeing us and saying, "not another one?!" As we saw a lot of our friends losing their parents, we feared losing our own. Many of the deaths we saw were very sudden and sadly, some of these people were in their 50's or early 60's. I told Tim at one point that I felt like we had moved into a period of our life that would be marked by
losses. He was pretty upset yesterday after we got this news and told his mother on the phone that it just felt like we are all dropping like flies. Tim's ex-boss, who is someone I've known since I was a child because I grew up being friends with his daughter, died quite suddenly from
an aneurism about 4 years ago. My father has an aneurism in his head that was found just a few years earlier when he was CT scanned after he was rear-ended by a truck while driving. At that point, I really started to worry about my own parents and I can remember very vividly thinking that the wind would surely be knocked out of my sails to lose them but that as long as I had Tim and Olivia, somehow I could muddle through. They are my world and I literally build my life around theirs.
Needless to say, Tim's cancer diagnosis brought the mortality thoughts even closer to home than I expected. Events don't always happen in the so-called "natural order" of things. The older generation doesn't always go first. I hate going to wakes. I hate when Tim is going to wakes. I hate that life is so damn fragile that a split second on the highway wipes out a life and destroys
countless others in the process. I hate that kids get sick and parents see their children suffer.
There should be a natural order of things. You're born, you live, you get old, you die, you go to heaven and see all your loved ones that went before you. PERIOD. Anything other than that makes no damn sense to me at all.