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The Mutter Masquerade passed. It did as it has every year since it started but this was the first year where I learned that I had “just missed it”. I open my calendar and write a note for September 15, 2017 to look into getting tickets. May this is the last year where I will have missed it. Oh tenses. I note an entry to the left four squares “Ashley D’s Birthday”. Again, tenses. September 11, 2017 would have been her birthday. She’s no longer with us.

Death or at least its pronouncements can form a kind of morbid metronome that hastens as you age but the last half decade has been a respite. In the 2000s I attended about one Boy Scout funeral a year for around a decade. The spread of ages results in no only a steady march of new sons but also the unwinding of fathers. After moving to the city I lost touch with those families and by extension their joys and tragedies. Then earlier this year a friend departed our company. She will be sorely missed.
I don’t want to see that little notifier, a barbed reminder of the arrow of time but there’s no simple way to remove it. I can turn off all birthdays but not just one. I could remove her from my contacts and after a few minutes of staring blankly and bits of information that tie to someone who isn’t there anymore I hit the delete key. I spam F5 and still her name persists. Staring at my screen, I issued a sad little laugh as I went through the indecorous process of posthumously unfollowing her on Google+. So this is where we are now. To Google, she still exists and I’ve simply chosen to not pay attention. She’s probably not sent or received any emails, IMs, Google+ posts, map queries, or made any Play Store transactions. Google doesn’t know if we just had a break up, a large argument, or she’s dropped off the grid. So wise yet so blind. This is a problem that will only build over time. At some point, more users of a given service will have departed than those who use it without appropriate vital hygiene. I guess it’s good for me to get used to this now.

Goodbye, Ashley.

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Patrick died today due to what I think were respiratory complications.  He was my nephew, my brother and his wife’s son, my father and mother’s grandchild.  It was like five people had died.  This was communicated to me over gChat at around 2am.  His birth announcement was made to me via text message and his updates came as Facebook posts and emails.  His was a life that was communicated to me almost entirely in electronic text.

Goodbye, Patrick.

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Pat Moore, my aunt, died sometime last night.  Previously, my plan was to drop off Suzie at the train station early in the morning, go back to sleep, see all my guests out to a late brunch and then drive down to Delaware with my brother and his wife to visit her as she fought late stage bile duct cancer.  I got the news driving back from Somerton station and wasn’t much able to get back to sleep.  I asked John and Ken to leave, canceled my lunch plans and sat and talked with Pat and Clara.  They are both in the medical field and are comfortable with death and generally I am too but I was glad for their company.

I didn’t really cry when my uncle Ted died nor at the passing of any of my grandparents.  I didn’t cry when Nate DeTemple passed nor any of the other camp staff members I knew left us.  But over the last year I’ve become either more emotional or more in touch with my own emotional state and while I don’t want to say I was hard hit by the death of my aunt it left me in tears at several points.  She was my favorite aunt/uncle and her decline was gradual and foreseeable but her passing was still forceful.  After Pat and Clara left I did my general browsing and found that Joe Paterno had died.  Someone for whom I have no strong feelings but lamentations at his passing would drown out any epitaph I’d have for the aunt that none of my friends knew.  My sadness passed to anger.  So I called some people, cleaned up some odds and ends left by my guests and drove to my mother’s house to feed her pet bird who knew nothing of why his owner was missing.

I sat in a dark kitchen and as I threw out my second tear-blotted tissue, I ask myself qui sum ego decet, who am I becoming.

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Pat Toye asked me to come up with a list of things more likely to kill you than swine flu to help calm down his over-reactive coworkers.  Right now, with 250 infected folk and an expected mortality of 2-4%, that puts us in the 5-10 dead area.  I work with the assumption in the US that only about a 1/4 of people will actually be correctly diagnosed and seek medical attention and still die so I’m looking for things that kill between 20-40 folks a year.  This is a short list from some of the more memorable filings in the “how people die” list:

  • Being trampled by a pig
  • Attacked by a robot (malfunctioning or damaged industrial robots mostly)
  • Allergic reaction to beaver meat or other large rodents
  • Choking on a writing instrument (mostly pens and pen caps)
  • Blood loss from a laceration caused by a household appliance (excludes suicide)
  • Committing suicide after losing an RPG character (excluded as it wasn’t an accidental event)
  • Overexertion during sex or masturbation
  • Being pushed in front of a moving object
  • Immolation in one’s own sleeping cloths
  • Assault by smoke, cinder, ashes or embers

Lets compare that to the biggies:
Cancer kills someone once a minute
Heart disease kills someone once every 30 seconds

Swine flu is currently slightly deadlier (factor of between 1.5 and 2) than dying from assault by strong acids or bases, being eaten by rats, or suffocation by flatulence.  Note that mortality statistics are tough to pin point, for instance if someone has a heart attack while driving and crashing into something the death could be heart disease or motor vehicle collision, but most statistics gun for proximate cause, what initial event initiated a chain of events that resulted in mortality.  So if someone accidentally jabs themselves in the eye with a mechanical pencil and while blinded stumbles into an open manhole cover the mechanical pencil is the proximate cause.  These numbers are from a number sources including the IIS, the CIA World Factbook, the root mortality study of 1988 and other things I’ve picked up like a 2003 article in Maxim magazine and margin notes in an insurance textbook.  Use with caution.