old cars and people

Your body gets like an old car when you get older. It gets harder and harder to maintain it. Parts keep breaking more and more often and something starts rattling and oozing over here and that wears out over there and it takes more and more time and effort to maintain it but maintain we must until the end of the road.

The last leaf

The last leaf. I feel more and more anymore like the last leaf. My infrastructure is disappearing. My web of lifelong connections is falling silent. I am becoming the last leaf.

https://poets.org/poem/last-leaf

I learned a couple of weeks ago that the drummer in one of our long ago bands has passed. The jarring thing is that he passed 6 years ago in 2014. Just a year or so ago I was thinking I should look him up and get together. Now I know that he was gone. He died in 2014, six years ago and I didn’t even know it. Friends, relatives, siblings, bandmates, classmates… one by one they drop. My world is shrinking. I am becoming the last leaf.