old dogs

A few nights ago I got the idea of searching the internet for the name of an old friend from decades ago and while I didn't exactly find him, I found an obituary for his father who I had also known long ago. In the obituary for his father it named survived by with the name of the friend I had looked for, his brother who I had known, and then the part where his mother had also passed away years before and his sister all that I had known and been very close to all those many years ago when I was in the process of getting through the trauma of divorce and just trying to find my way. 

As I have gotten older I've found that deaths have the effect of forcing me to look closer at my own mortality and just how quickly death can come and how instant the finality of life is at death. 

I began looking up other names from the past and even the high school FB page from the class I would have graduated in. This was a mistake for me as many names I was familiar with have died. This put me in a place of deep sadness when I realize how short a time we are actually here and how much of that time we just waste as if we can make it up tomorrow. 

I've done very well in some areas of my life and failed miserably at many others. I've spent more time trying to look back and figure out how those failures happened even while knowing there is no going back to fix that stuff and none of those opportunities to make wonderful memories has a do over option. My time spent looking back is an example of the waste a lot of us probably do that makes no sense but we do it anyway and then some of us write about it compounding the waste.

When the minutes, months and decades are pissed off, we don't get any of those back. They are gone forever and in their place lies piles of regrets we take with us for the rest of our days. I'm finding the load to be quite heavy and hard to manage these days. I need to stop beating myself up so viciously at this stage of the life I have left and find ways of not adding more weight to the regrets I already carry. 

Can't go back, can't recover what has been lost or given away, and those who have passed before me would have given anything to have had one more day and you can bet it wouldn't have been wasted looking back and drowning in grief and depression.