I am 28. Trust me. I just had to count and check. So yes, I am. Twenty-Freakin-Eight. And I have been to more funerals than your average 70 year old. Sometimes I think, there has to be a lesson here. A path for me to be of service. Because it is either that, or I am a jinx. Run away people, run away.
In fact my Hubby, who lost his father aged 50, when he was an itty bitty 23 years of age, had never really been to a funeral until he met me. And in our first two months home we attended three. My cousin aged 18, my last remaining grandmother and the women who had been like a grandmother to me. He was overwhelmed. But it gave him an idea of how things went down when the unimaginable happened and he had too bury his father.
Me. I’m an old pro. Large family. Rural’ish community. I had been to more funerals than you could count on both hands before I was 20. And that didn’t count the one’s I sang in the school choir for. Friends, friends of friends, relatives {mostly elderly, some not}… The hands I held. The tears I cried {no really, there is no less cliched way of saying that}. the celebration of lives with drinks that served the dual purpose of celebration and numbing the pain. All of it.
At one stage I just sat in the door frame of my car, out the front of my parents transport depot, and sobbed. That I couldn’t take any more loss. I wasn’t strong enough. I hurt too badly. I didn’t know how to. That it wasn’t fair. I feel for that poor girl. Because I know the emotion, the upset and the heartbreak of wondering, was there more to be done, could she have made a difference… What was the point of this. This LIFE thing.
And yet, I am lucky. My immediate family remains intact. My friends. People who I would consider irreplaceable are still without the need to be replaced. I know the hurt of loss but not the agony of the loss of someone who means EVERYTHING to me. I can imagine it. I feel empathy for it. But that is a pain I am yet to experience.
I guess that means my jinx’ie’ness isn’t that bad after all.
Touch wood.
Suger 
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