What scares me

It’s not that Mary’s death was a wake-up call. I don’t feel like I see life as being any more ephemeral. It’s just made me more nervous.

Do we all generally grow up with a notion of fairness? A force for cosmic karma. “That’s not fair!” is a refrain that regularly rings in our house. Kids (think they) know fairness.

I don’t remember believing in the fairness of life. The unfairness is writ large on the nightly news. I suspect considered globally I’m more lucky than most.

Maybe it’s not fairness that’s innate, maybe it’s justice. We see bad things happen, we see people act in bad ways, and we have an intuition about the appropriate consequences that should (there’s that word again) be meted out. Not all intuitions are the same for all people, but the people who park in the no parking zone along my bike route deserve a fine, the guy who drives home drunk deserves to lose his licence. And so say all of us.

Justice in this sense relies on some objective score keeper. My nervousness is that there’s no score keeper. Stuff happens, and the score just resets, it’s never settled. There’s no bargaining. Things just continue. Events play out with little regard to the independent events that went before.

What scares me is that my life is reset and so is the score. My needs and my purpose are reset, refocussed on Harry and Cara. But they’ve only got one parent left now. The chances of them losing me are no less than they were before Mary died. Nor are the chances of me losing one of them. The score keeper doesn’t care that they’ve already lost a sister, and now a mother.

After Ellen died, there was comfort in the thought that Mary and I were stronger people. We’d come out the other side and life could still be good. This loss is harder to take, not the least because the loss highlights the possibility loss itself.

[Having just re-read that paragraph it strikes me that “loss” is a strange word. Kind of PC. When I lose my keys – it happens a lot – I’m always fairly sure I’ll find them again, and I do. The right word is probably “death” though I feel it’s a little too dramatic. The right words are always hard.]

It’s hard not to think about further death. It’s hard not to wish for a just and fair score keeper. It’s just hard. But the game will go on and when it happens to me, my kids, my family or friends, I guess we’ll keep on playing. Like conceding goals in a football match, the referee will simply blow his whistle, the players pause and reflect, but then the whistle blows again and the good footballers start over. The good batsmen puts the fact he’s just played and missed out of his mind.

It’s hard when your team feels so far behind, and you have no idea how much longer there is to play. How many comebacks do we have in us I wonder. Maybe it doesn’t matter, so long as there’s one more. What scares me is if there’s not.