Meditatin' on Death

"Fifteen steps and then a sheer drop"
"Fifteen Steps" Radiohead --

Some recent news has me thinking about the end of life. One of the girls in my support group sent out an email saying she has inoperable cancer, and less than a year to live. I'm hopeful she'll beat the odds and give the doctors "what for", but we do all wind up in the same place eventually. This news, combined with an aunt's death and the eminent surgery of an online friend (non-life threatening, I think), has made me a little preoccupied.

And my thoughts are more about aftermath than death itself. Specifically, if I were to buy the farm without warning, how would my friends know it?

I am very much a fringe member of my support group. I don't go out clubbing with the core group. In fact, I've been to three meetings, just two in girl-mode. They don't know me outside of the meetings. They wouldn't know me from Adam (or Eve) if my obit showed up in the local paper, because I'm very protective of my anonymity.

I don't think I could count on my wife to go to a meeting to share the tragic tale of my premature demise. She'd want to forget I ever had such acquaintances, I suspect.

That leaves my therapist. She's really the only link between my two worlds. She's already assured me that she would surreptiously attend my funeral, and discreetly deposit some makeup items in my casket. Truly a friend. She'll have to tell my friends that I'm gone.

That just seems so sad and anticlimactic. Lonely lives of quiet desperation, followed by anonymous passings. My avatar would live on forever, a pathetic bid for immortality. You never die online, right?

Okay, this is not a cry for help. I am not currently depressed, and have no plans to die anytime soon. This is just an attempt to exorcise these thoughts by committing them to "paper."
Something lighter next time, I hope. Move along, nothing to see here...