This Is The End, My Friend, The End

The father of my dear sincity friend, Spandex, succumbed to the inevitability a few days ago, a father with whom he was close.  Spandex is about twenty years younger than me so I can share my very real recollections of how the loss of both of my parents and my A.A. sponsor of twenty-five years - more of a everyday dad than my real father - affected me.  If a parent lives to a reasonably ripe old age the loss brings into sharp reflection that there really is an end game here.  People are going to get older and get sicker and then die.  We can speculate all we want about What Comes Next but there are no known examples of anyone cheating The End here on earth.  Death is a very real, very defined thing.  The person is gone and that, my friends, is that.  I try my best to live a good life and to treat people well because at some point there's not going to be a chance to correct wrongs, to make things right.  Some regret is going to be inevitable but let's all try to keep our side of the street squeaky clean.  Let's avoid those "I shoulda done this" and those "I shouldna done that" to a dull roar, to an absolute minimum.

I was at the endodontist yesterday to have a root canal redone - should I call that a re-root? - and this was the second root canal that had to be redone.  The endodontist shrugged when we were talking about why this was happening.  Sometimes stuff doesn't work out.  Sometimes people get cancer.  Sometimes people abuse their teeth for their whole lives and suffer no adverse consequences and sometimes people (Me!  That people!) floss and brush and water-pik and get regular check-ups and my teeth shrug - meh - and fall apart.  And I'm aware that at my age the ability of my body to repair itself gets more and more tenuous.  All I can do is to take good action and - when things don't work out the way I want them to - sit quietly with the results and learn whatever lesson is there for me to learn.  The doctor and I yesterday briefly talked about the misery that almost always occured to the few people who made it to my age who 100 years ago.  No novocaine.  No implants.  Crappy antibiotics.  No pain killers if a tooth needed to be extracted.  I'm assuming most older people were walking around with half of their teeth gone, gumming their gruel in the morning.  My jaw was damn sore last night - so what?

Thanks to Jim Morrison and The Doors for today's title.