Auld Lang Syne

The holidays are over. The new year's begun.

I'm remembering last week's Warner Christmas Party and chuckling to myself. I'm also speculating what this next twelve months may bring. I'm hopeful!

Yet! I sit here asking the inevitable question: Who's Next?

I say the question's inevitable for me now, because -- my advancing age aside -- I realize that if Nancy can die, then anyone can die. Death brings unalterable changes to survivors.

Such a realization no doubt separates the so-called young-old from the old-old. Does this latter category include in-between-me? I'm not certain.

(Maybe age is not a significant factor. Death appears to respect rules regarding equal opportunity.)

But this much more must be acknowledged, must be said aloud: each death brings with it a physical and emotional change that bestows upon survivors a sort of Supreme Badge of Merit -- a Medal of Grief Survival.

This grief varies with the closeness and intensity of the love lost. At the extreme-love end of the spectrum, the lover loses his lover, their shared life, his own life as he has experienced it -- his present and future lives as these have been lived and planned.

The survivor may lose as well the will to go on -- yet somehow slogs on. Somehow unendurable pain is endured until it miraculously lessens over time. For many, given time, a renewal slowly occurs -- a renewal as unimaginable as was the pain immediately following the loss.

So when I ask Who's Next? I ask it not casually, but with a terror for those close to who's next that comes with having endured such loss myself.

Emily Dickinson speaks of survivor-death-pain as some survivors endure it:

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself.
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

Such pain is all-consuming, unrelenting. It appears unendurable. Most important: it lessens with time, despite fears it will not. Again, the who's next question is asked fearfully, not casually.

This commentary sounds morbid, I am certain. But it's not a strange question for anyone in my age-range to ask. If you have the temerity to live into your mid-seventies, friends and family drop around you in a veritable rush. Survivors can't help wondering who's next. We line up like elementary-school children awaiting dismissal to mid-afternoon recess.

It might even feel good to step politely back and volunteer one's own place in line to some of the young-old set. Can't tell: try to think of a moment when politeness doesn't pay big dividends.


Who's next is a worrisome question. Within a close and loving family, any forthcoming answer is bound to be upsetting. Still, at intervals I find myself becoming curiouser and curiouser, as Alice once proclaimed. I wonder what I can do, what anyone can do to help the next survivor. Never mind that I know from experience there is little more anyone CAN do than say:

"I am so sorry for your loss!"

Believe me, I mean these simple words I offer more and more often at Memorial Services for my friends and family. I strongly identify. Death and its sober realities strike home -- once it has disrupted the sanctity of one's own home.


I hastily shake off this chilly commentary and change the subject somewhat: we're a far-flung family, with two generations spread from New York City to the Carolinas, to Miami and Atlanta, to parts unknown. Absence is a sort of death. Especially during the holidays, absence lends credence to the words "Wish you were here. "Sometimes it really is "A Blue Christmas Without You."

What's the word for finely blended joy and sorrow? Nostalgia maybe.

Maybe not. But let it stand.

Next time you're enjoying a holiday party, and you sing Auld Lang Syne, feel keenly the true sense of that well-known, long-sung lyric. Keenly remember the old times, the old loves forever new. Know that time is fleeting. Resolve to feel deeply, and openly express the love you experience here and now.

And believe fully as you can, you will someday be reunited with true loves and loved friends now gone. Lest old acquaintance be forgot, remember. . . .

Remembering may well be the
only way we truly meet again.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!