Déjà vu Death

I feel so strange today. I keep having déjà vu moments, like an itch at the back of the brain. I keep thinking about death, but not really thinking about it, just this strange feeling that I’ve felt this before. Rosalie is working. The cats are sleeping. And I’m here at the computer, listening to Ian Shaw sing strange songs, watching the trees bouncing around in the wind out my back window. The sun is shining, the temperatures are unusually low, and it feels more like a fall day than a mid-September day in the Valley. And there it is again, that feeling of death in the air. I’m feeling my age more and more lately. I keep remembering all the people I’ve known who've vanished. My mother and father, my sister Helen and my brother Dick. The many people I used to golf with here in Sun City West dropping away. The actors and actresses who were my favorites, the writers I’ve admired. I think about Bill Pilgrim, my old friend who left me and this earth when he was only thirty-eight. I think about Chuck Cavallero, my old music-writing buddy whom I left over fifty years ago, who fell to cancer ten years ago, news I had to find out via the internet. William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” all over me:

“So live, that when thy summons comes to join / The innumerable caravan which moves / To that mysterious realm where each shall take / His chamber in the silent halls of death, / Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, / Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed / By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, / Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch / About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”

I still have so much to do and my time is running out. I need to shake off this odd, oddly painful feeling that the season is dying, that I’m dying along with it. I need to shake off Bryant’s “drapery” and get on with my life no matter how little I have left.