In addition to my aunt and two uncles dying in the last six months, I've discovered on the intertubes that one of my closest former co-worker friends from 35 years ago died in 2019, and another former co-worker I'd been fairly close to died last February. (During COVID, but not from it.)
So a couple days ago I was talking about another co-worker, a pretty rough-edged dude with a very checkered past I worked with 30 years ago, who left our small paper abruptly in 1990 and then moved 3/4 of the way across the country, and discovered he had died in January 1994 (utterly coincidentally, four days before my mom died).
That discovery came as no real surprise to me, I knew this MFker had been involved in some seriously sketchy ship previous to my knowing him, and his lifestyle hadn't exactly been an advertisement for healthy living, but I was still half expecting to find he was living in some desert commune or something somewhere. He had a somewhat unusual ethnic name so I figured if I googled I'd probably come up with stuff on him.
I did come up with some college paper issues from the early Seventies which filled in some of the gaps on his "sketchy ship," he was pinched a couple times for selling pills, pot possession, possession of meth with intent to distribute, etc etc. He got probation in most of the cases but it wasn't hard to see how he was gonna wind up in Illinois state prison, where our general manager hired him a year before I arrived as M.E. After he left our little dishrag, he moved out west, but also seemed to drop off the Google timeline
But there it was, a one line obit in newspapers.com:
"Sam Sketchydude, 42, newspaper reporter, died Jan. 1, 1994, in Pounding Rocks, AZ."
That's it. Nothing more. The only indication on the internet he had shuffled off this mortal coil.
Anyway, mortality's been hitting me from every angle lately.
My mother, her father, BOTH her grandfathers, and two more of my fairly direct ancestors all died at 63 (from no related causes as far as I know) and I'm about halfway through to 64 (September). I feel generally ok, but I do have a few nagging health things going on, so I'll still be nervous a few more months.
So now I'm definitely devoting some thoughts to my playlist.
One complicating factor is that the Catholic Church is still pretty sticky about what music they allow at in-church ceremonies (baptisms, weddings, funerals) -- basically very few "popular" songs.
I've been a very loosely connected semi-fallen Catholic for about 40 years, but as Bruce Springsteen says, "once you're on the team, you never really leave," and if nothing else as an example for my godchildren and grand-godchildren, I want to have at least an ecclesiastically acceptable funeral ceremony -- that is, something they won't risk excommunication for taking part in.
So instead I'm planning a toe tapping Irish wake to follow the funeral. That's where I'll program the audio and visual production.
My youngest niece, in addition to a crackerjack basketball and softball player, is becoming quite a prodigy in Irish dance. Maybe she'll lead the crowd in a high stepping jig to Dropkick Murphy's.