Life Trek: The Next Generation

     Death.   It’s just one of those things that we all have to face someday…but somehow we all try to ignore that fact--until someone presses our noses into its smelly truth.

     When a great-grandparent dies, there’s a little sadness, but at least you know that Grandma or Grandpa are going to carry on with the little ways of life that your great grandparent started.  When one of your grandparents die, you miss them, because they have been a big part of your life (in most cases).

     But when a parent dies, there is something much more immediate to that passing.  Perhaps it’s the physical connection—after all, these are the people who gave you life, and now their own is over.

     Or perhaps it is the intimation of our own mortality that is proven by the fact that our progenitors are dead; therefore, we too will someday die.  

     Or maybe it’s the fact that, with the passing of our parents generation, there is no other generation that is slated for demise but our own.   No longer two, or even three generations lie ahead of us under the Grim Reaper’s scythe.   No, when our parents go, we can hear the wind whistling under his blade, and we now know that the next time the blade falls, it is our turn.

     Mortality has but one drawback—and that is the fact of its existence.   Death is assured.   As a noted science fiction author once put it, “Life is just the daily putting off of the inevitable.”

     And so it goes…