Forever Young

 It's probably my own fault. At some point in the past ten years or so I mentioned that I wouldn't mind if Bob Dylan's song "Forever Young" was played at my memorial service. Not that I was making plans for anything specific. It just occurred to me as a particularly appropriate set of words to describe my hopes not necessarily for myself but for my son and future generations of us who come along. 

May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
And may you stay forever young

I would not have imagined that near the beginning of my sixtieth year that I would be attending a memorial service for the little girl who used to live across the street. The one who taught my son to walk. The one who grew up to have a passel of kids herself.  The one whose life got away from her. She died shorty after her thirty-fifth birthday. It pained me, not just because this was Labor Day Weekend and not Memorial Day Weekend. It pained me because the slideshow that preceded the service included that song. As I sat there in the pew next to my wife, wondering why there were cushions on the fold out kneeling benches but not underneath me, I looked around at the mourners in the room with me. The overwhelming majority of them were younger than me. By about three touchdowns or more. These were the kids from our neighborhood twenty-five years ago. 

And their children. 

The other "old man" in attendance was the father of that brood from across the street. The man who had lost his wife and now his daughter over the course of the past year. He looked as if youth had been forcibly drained from him. Along with the courage. And the strength. 

This is about the time that it occurred to me that the song was for the young lady in the box at the front of the room. The old saw about living fast, dying young, and leaving a good-looking corpse flashed through my mind. The hubris of such a sentiment was painfully clear to me. After years of hustling and spinning that sentiment as if it were something real. 

Forever young. It's about the saddest thing I can imagine.