...lightning.

[merimask]

Hmm.  I had a pleasant Saturday evening date with my husband.  I was informed that we'd do anything that I wanted.    That meant seafood at The Dock At The Bay, movie rental (because I didn't feel like fighting the crowds on a rainy night ), and a slice of cake from The Dessert Deli (they made our wedding cake.   They totally own Amherst...half the town was in that place on a Saturday night paying 5 bucks for a slice of cake and LOVING it).

So we watched Silent Hill (meh  *shrug*  It ain't art, I'll say that much.  Probably would have liked it better if I'd ever played the game), ate cake, got cozy, napped...  All very pleasant.  

Then I wake up because the wind is howling and the rain is falling in buckets, and I decide to check up with my eBay auctions online...and I find e-mail from some friends, informing me that someone we all know died this morning.

She was my age and she was a strange bird prone to bouts of crazy...but she introduced me to anime and she made really great cocoa and even though we clashed sometimes, I always admired her.  She had lovely long red hair and she was a very good fencer.  She bought her first house at 24...quite a feat for a single girl...and lived in it quite nicely, all alone.  She was very smart and very independent...she had great art on the walls.

I knew she was sick...she's had breast cancer for three years, but I didn't know how ill she'd become.  I was going to give her a call and see how she was doing.  

...  I have nothing much more to say.  I'm not exactly devastated or anything...I'm just saddened and feeling my mortality.  She was my age and she's gone, and isn't the world a capricious place?  Lightning strikes or it doesn't.  The lump is just a cyst or maybe a malignant tumor.  There's no telling which way it'll go.   Usually I'm fine with that.  Tonight, I'm hearing the storm at my window and it sounds...close.

Comments

[pzb.livejournal.com]

I think battling your own mortality is certainly one of the hardest things you'll ever face. When Jim's sister died three years ago from cirvical cancer, she was only two years older than me. So I understand what you're feeling right now. *sigh* yay fun memories....XP

Heee....good seafood sounds so good right about now....we're much further inland that we were in CA, so that kinda kills any great seafood for the most part...

[merimask.livejournal.com]

It's...yeah, it's a rough thing when anyone dies but it's especially personal when it happens to someone in your own generation, 'cause you have a sense of invulnerability and I see how it's going to erode away as the years pass.

Agh! I sound so selfish and I ~know~ it, but I keep thinking in terms of what D's death means for me...in my life. How self-centered is that? I just keep thinking about what would happen to Greg or Charlotte if I was gone. It's beyond contemplating.

[pzb.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call it selfish or self-centered... It's part of dealing with your mortality. The day they decided to let Beth go, I called my mom, asking her to come out to the hospital. She wound up calling back, saying she couldn't because she was crying so hard at the thought of what if that had been me, since I was only 2 years younger. It could have been. And that's a scary thought. Several times I've thought about it, that it easily could have been me...what would my mom and Jim do.... It's just part of the mourning process....good ol' survivor's guilt. ;)

[moko-moko.livejournal.com]

It's really rough when you have those days thinking of 'life' in general like that. It keeps me up nights sometimes. And then I read about your awesome date, and everything's okay! It sounded like a wonderful day, just being with the one you love~~ *small squee*

[merimask.livejournal.com]

Do you do that too? I freak myself out periodically, thinking very clearly about death and what it really means. It's horrible to really actualize the concept...it's almost beyond imagining and when I do have those moments of awful clarity there are a few minutes of "OMG there's no way I can think about this for too long..." and then I have to back away like a person at the edge of a cliff.

I'd MUCH rather be sucked into a neat video game like you are right now. ;-) *is SO jealous*

[moko-moko.livejournal.com]

ohgod, something just as bad me and my friend Zoe used to do is ponder the afterlife right as we were going to sleep (doing ANY of the above is a bad idea, btw) because...you're living in the ~now~, seeing from your own eyes, feeling with your skin, everything is here and now and ~ME~... but what's to say you haven't done this before? That this same consciousness you experience has happened over and over again? I'm so praying for something after death that isn't another life, I quite enjoy mine. Something pleasant would be nice.

Kay, that's depressing, BACK TO OKAMI. WHY DO YOU NOT HAVE A COPY YET?

[merimask.livejournal.com]

"BACK TO OKAMI. WHY DO YOU NOT HAVE A COPY YET?"

I don't KNOOOOOW! Waaah! Greg said he ordered it, like, two months ago from someplace online, but they keep saying it's out of stock. I guess there were so many prepaid orders they ran out long before they could fill 'em all. So...I LOSE! Grr! No word on when it'll be shipped, either. I keep checking, every day, but no joy.

I read about it over a year ago in some gaming magazine and I've been waiting for it patiently...but now that it's finally been released in this country I'm just dying to get my hands on it and I am DENIED.

[geirny.livejournal.com]

I know exactly how you are feeling.

Give me a call. We said we were going to keep in better touch then didn't, but I wish we had.

Luv ya,
Kim

[merimask.livejournal.com]

Hey Kimmie... :-)

I tried calling yesterday! But you were gone. Howie said you were at a "scribal" meeting and I heard "Scrabble" and I actually whined and said "Aww I LOVE Scrabble!" and I don't think he knew what to say. *I'm a freak*

[geirny.livejournal.com]

Hehe He told me you called today. I was like thanks for telling me, I just wrote her a comment asking her to. At least I got the message you called even if it was a day later. Sometimes he forgets entirely. :-) Sorry I missed your call.

I like Scrabble too but I don't think I'd play with you... you and Greg are way too intelligent and my sad little scoring average would be an embarassment! *big grin*

Luv ya,
Kimmie

[rumdiculous.livejournal.com]

Facing mortality and death is almost like a slap to the face. No one wants to think about that part of life because it's an ending. And nobody likes endings.

*hugs*

I loved Silent Hill. The people who worked on that movie should be the only ones to ever do any other game-to-big-screen movies. Konomi even put their name on the movie. Most video games companies won't do that because the adaptation sucks. (I'm thinking of Resident Evil which sucked big time. Did these people ever play the damn games? Once??)

But yeah, there were actual scenes out of the game in the movie. And the camera direction was fabulous.

[merimask.livejournal.com]

Dying scares the crap out of me. I've decided not to do it. *only half joking*

Y'know...I had the feeling that I would have ~loved~ that movie if I'd ever played the game. It seemed really true to the game, it even ~looked~ just like the game. I love the visual impact of that ghost town with the ash falling from the sky, it was chilling and a little beautiful.

I could tell it was faithful to the game because it was even structured like a game...Greg and I got a kick out of saying stuff like "Level one: The Town", "Level Two: The Underground". After that scene where the really scary dude with a triangle for a head chased the women into that little room full of big scary gears (and they eventually get away), I turned to Greg and said "That boss was a bitch. I'm so glad I downloaded those cheat codes!", and we cracked up. Oh...gaming geek humor, how I love you. :-)

[rumdiculous.livejournal.com]

:) Dying doesn't scare me at all not after some thing's I've seen. *shrug* I'm more worried about the people I'd leave behind and what they'd go through.

Some of the moments in that movie were absolutely stunning (and creepy as hell). The lighting was perfect and the with the music swelling at the right moments...*sigh* I love that movie...

LOL I saw the movie with a friend of mine and we were fairly familiar with the game. We'd briefly played them (they're really friggin hard) and knew about most of the baddies. When Triangle Head showed up we flipped out and started screaming, "Oh my GOD! She's so screwed!" And our jaws about hit the ground when she found the nurses. In the game they were so hard to fight. (It seems like females in games are harder to kill)

[soliloquy-fair.livejournal.com]

It's so strange to read everyone else's comments. I've had a girl I knew who was much younger than me die, but that's about it. I was shocked when I heard but it didn't make me think about my own death. Nothing does, really, because I've been absolutely sure I was going to die since I was twelve and somehow the thought of dying of disease or something beforehand doesn't freak me out that much. A little, but not much...and I WAS told I had a huge tumour that could be cancerous (and it was HUGE) and it was full month before I found out that it wasn't...but I just felt kind of 'rushed'. Like, "Okay, now I'm going to have to wrap this and this and this up super fast, or there's going to be trouble," kind of a thing.

I do NOT know exactly why that is, since I'm quite happy to be alive and do not look forward to dying. At all. But nothing like this ever seems to make me worry about my mortality since I went through that relentlessly in my teens and have exhausted the fear, by now. It was just kind of surreal to read this post/the comments...there is clearly some strange wiring in my brain.

Possibly I've just gotten so good at suppressing that nothing makes a dent anymore because I smooth it over right away? But anyway...that cake sounds awfully good. I don't eat cake much because since I AM alive, I prefer to be slim while I'm around, lol. What a vain, silly little puss.

Right now I really want cheesecake. A LOT.

[merimask.livejournal.com]

I often wonder if it was my upbringing that leaves me feeling a little (a lot, really) rudderless when it comes to dealing with death. My family is not religious, and furthermore my Mom witnessed her little brother getting killed in the road by a car when she was a child. She was eight, he was five, and it traumatized her in a way that caused her to obsess her whole life about death and terrible things happening. But, without religion, we have no "life after death" belief to cushion the concept of mortality, and I have to say it always has and always will freak me out, I think. I think the only reason I might ever wish to have a strong religious belief would be to alleviate that fear of death.

You have so much balance and poise when it comes to your mortality...it's enviable.

As is your resistance to cake! :-) Me, I guess I'm a bit of a hedonist (but then, if you ever tasted a Dessert Deli cake you might become a hedonist too!).

[golden-meliades.livejournal.com]

No food has the power to turn me, I am steel ;)

I don't believe in heaven either, or any life after death. Too bad, it's a nice idea...but no. As Hojo in Ruroken says...we're just meat. In my case, I think religion would me more what makes death kind of scary. (They don't teach heaven...but at least they don't teach hell, either, in our case. Still, it wasn't for me.)

Honestly, I think I'm just mentally bent. :) My whole mentality is just one giant shrug, when you get down to the core.