Family Friend Passing

I recently learned that a close friend of the family passed away. Long time readers might remember me blogging about my family being in a partnership with another family in a small entrepreneurial jewellery making business. We had a stall at the weekly farmer's market in Guelph and a kiosk at Old Quebec Street Mall during the Christmas season.

Before all that, though, I met her when I took up a light landscaping job after finishing Ways2Work, which slightly predates this blog. This basically means I became her gardener.  I don't want to get too into it, but at the time we met, I was really unsocialized and lacking in life experience. It hadn't been long since graduating high school and finding myself without any sense of direction, as well as breaking up with my first girlfriend, so we met when I was at an all time low. It wouldn't take long after we met that my life would explode, getting into Katimavik, then my first full-time employment, then Canada World Youth, then college, then employment inside my field. So she really got to see the full spectrum of my life. She was always good for a pep talk and able to give me sound life advice based on her wisdom and experience, and I greatly valued her insights.

After working for her for a bit, she got to meet my brother and mother, and became good friends with both of them. This was also during a time that was relatively difficult for the both of them. We're all doing much better now.

From there, she and my mother hatched the jewellery making business idea, who kind of spearheaded it while me, my brother, and her partner were all involved as well.

She was like an honourary grandmother to the family, and I really did love her.

She had had a number of close calls with death. Even when I met her, she was contemplating her mortality. All things considered, we were lucky that she lived as long as she did. I got to speak with her shortly before she passed and she seemed healthy. It even caused me to pause and think that it had been a long time since she had had a medical scare.

That being said, her life had become more and more restrictive in the eight years that I knew her, and people close to her felt that it was her time to go.

I feel like I've experienced a lot of death in the past few years. I never really got to experience loss of a loved one as a child, so I feel like I didn't get to normalize the concept, or at least see it as natural. But my mother pointed out that at this time in our lives, I've experienced more loss overall than she has.

Back in high school, at the age of sixteen, a close friend of mine died by suicide. In college, a friend died of a rare neurological disease at the age of eighteen. This year, two people that I've worked with continually over the past four years passed, ages 28 and 46. Young deaths.

I'm sure that's not a huge list compared with some others, but each of those carries some weight. At least with this more recent passing, it more closely resembled old age and natural causes. Feels a bit less unfair, and even if I didn't get to say goodbye, our final conversation was sweet.