There Are No New Old Friends – Part 1

(Thoughts prompted by a long-standing friend’s death, acted out over several months.)

Pretty-Coloured Melancholy

The normal autumn thoughts. The obvious. Thinking about endings and all the predictable permutations. Sentiments as worn out as the fallen leaves I scuff and scrunch through. Pretty-coloured melancholy.

I understand the theory: if you find yourself thinking about death in autumn, then thinking about it as a necessity is sensible. But while any fool knows that nothing lasts for ever, it’s hard to accept that as ‘just the way it is’.

Perhaps even more daunting is that finding the resolve to accept death – even if it is a lofty ambition – isn’t enough. Perhaps we should be celebrating it.

It’s not that we have to begrudgingly accept death as something forced upon us. It’s not as if it’s in any way not inevitable. The planet needs it. The planet wouldn’t be viable if all the lives lived upon it were eternal. One way or another, every death of every type of life ends up a fraction, however tiny, of the future’s foundations. That’s surely an unmistakably, undeniably positive thing, at least in potential.

I want to believe that that’s a reality we should welcome, that’s worth some kind of celebration.