Change

A few days ago Senator Edward “Teddy” Kennedy passed away after a relatively short illness. Last year he was diagnosed with brain cancer and he had been tenaciously fighting the disease.
It’s been a strange summer. One quiet morning we awoke to find that Ed McMahon had died. No sooner did we digest that Farrah Fawcett died. Literally by that afternoon we got the announcement of Micheal Jackson’s had died. That trifecta was almost too much to handle. Soon thereafter Walter Cronkite died. Then Robert Novack died, followed by Don Hewitt, the 60minutes producer, he also died. I am being overdosed by death. When Edward Kennedy died there was no room in the obit for the announcement that Dominick Dunne had died. It’s too much.
It seems to me that I have arrived at a crossroads. The things I grew up with, the people I knew through television, or read or followed their careers are now going the way of all life. They are dying. I definitely feel old today. I feel like my family is dying around me and I will be the only one left who knows what was what and how things should be. I mean that in a communal way. My virtual family is slipping away and I can’t stop them, one by one. Even my one of my oldest (began watching with my grandmother at age 3) soap operas, the Guiding Light is ending. I feel like I don’t have anything concrete to hold onto. It feels like the ground is giving way beneath me.
On the other hand, it’s just change. New memories and life changing events will continue daily. A new day is here and I must embrace it, warmly and with openness. But I am nostalgic for some of the good old days.