Memento Mori

Lately I've commemorated several deaths in posts on this blog, among them some very good friends and colleagues, all but one older than I. Yesterday's newspaper carried the obituary of yet another, a friend and former neighbour in the condo where I live. He was born earlier in the same year as I, in 1926, so he was just a few months older than I. 

Today's emails included one with the very sad news of another death, this time a young woman, a writer, to whom I was at first an email mentor for a year or so, then Wendy and I met her and her husband, whom I already knew, stayed with them for a few days during one of our annual visits to Australia in the mid 1990s. Her husband was still a rural GP in those days, poised for the leap he soon made into academia. He followed the same path I'd trod, from scholarly general practice into epidemiology and public health. I'm pleased and proud to have been his role model. His wife and I became close internet friends as so many of us were inclined to do in the early days of email when we became 'electronically intimate.' I described her as a 'young' woman and by today's standards she was young, in her 50s I suppose. She wrote well, and my editorial suggestions probably helped to improve her collection of connected short stories which were published by an offshoot of the BMA. I understand they sold quite well, so that was a success for both of us. 

I've heard others say, and now I say it myself, that you know you are old when the deaths reported in the press and in professional journals are of people younger than yourself. That's surely happening increasingly often to me.