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I Forgot They Had Died
Where do the people we grow up with go?
When you’re almost middle age, much of life has passed you by. Babies have been born, grown up, and become new adults; others have been born and turned into teenagers.
Meanwhile, we’ve arrived here, not quite sure what happened between the first day of college, the last day, the first day of work, the panic of adulthood, and the acceptance of things.
Here we are, like this.
And time, which once seemed like an enigma — especially the time that happened before our birth — has become less and less of that. Ten years are no longer an eternity. They’re just the sum of months, without any pauses in the course of our story.
As children, we couldn’t visualize that. Despite knowing they had been young, our parents seemed to be adults who had landed in that state. We couldn’t understand that ten years before, they had been teenagers.
We thought life was made up of chapters, with well-defined pauses, as if life could be interrupted by a kind of deep sleep, waking up like in a movie, ready to live the next stage.
Similarly to the life we witness, in all its shapes and forms, those between 35 and 40 have also seen many who are no longer with us.
