A very quiet, shy person like myself starting to lose classmates that I really would have loved to have known ( but thought were too scary)
We are all the same
Loss
-
whippoorwill
- Posts: 4679
- Joined: Fri Dec 28, 2018 5:17 pm
Re: Loss
I'm sorry to hear about your classmates. I've lost several myself.
I've been fortunate to have been invited to an online group of some very nice classmates, almost none of whom I was close to back in the day. But they reached out to commiserate with me over their despair to find out so many in our class were on board with the Trump nuttiness, and acting like complete assholes according to their hero's model. Most of them I haddn't have much of a relationship with because they were girls, and what could be more terrifying than that? But one of them was a guy named Eric, who moved from New Zealand about sixth grade, and so was willing to hang with nerds like myself. But by ninth or 10th grade, it was clear he was cooler than my set. He probably was our first guy to get a tattoo, getting the Stray Cats cat logo on his deltoid to go with the rockabilly pompadour he adopted. We stayed friendly enough in passing, but he had a very different crowd in high school. Although we both loved the dark music we were discovering, he was cool and I was awkward. As punks go, I was more Ian Curtis and he more Stewart Copeland (even if he longed to be Brian Setzer).
But he was in this online group, as it was started by his high school girlfriend (I feel like they made out in the hallway in the same spot for about three years), and it was really great getting to know him again. He very happy in his second marriage and was taking a 20th anniversary trip to the Balkans before taking his daughter off to her freshman year of college, but while there, he had a massive aneurysm. His wife was able to get him to a hospital but he had bled too much in the brain and it was understood to be unrecoverable. It took all sorts of diplomatic gymnastics to get him home, where he lingered in a coma for about six weeks before dying.
It was really weird that I was in this special group that was being given updates while the new was embargoed from being shared with the cooler folks he knew, but I filled in one or two mutual friends that I knew would like to reach out to his wife before his passing.
So yeah, if I appreciate social media for anything, it's been the opportunity to reconnect with some old classmates and being delighted to find out that they've grown up. But some, with whom I initially found to have matured beyond the assholes they were, couldn't help responding to catching up by eventually falling back into old grooves, re-establishing old cliques, being malicious to the weakest, and really regressing rapidly in their online personas, acting (and spelling) like they were back in fourth grade. Fuck that noise.
Anyhow, this was Eric, from my yearbook:
I've been fortunate to have been invited to an online group of some very nice classmates, almost none of whom I was close to back in the day. But they reached out to commiserate with me over their despair to find out so many in our class were on board with the Trump nuttiness, and acting like complete assholes according to their hero's model. Most of them I haddn't have much of a relationship with because they were girls, and what could be more terrifying than that? But one of them was a guy named Eric, who moved from New Zealand about sixth grade, and so was willing to hang with nerds like myself. But by ninth or 10th grade, it was clear he was cooler than my set. He probably was our first guy to get a tattoo, getting the Stray Cats cat logo on his deltoid to go with the rockabilly pompadour he adopted. We stayed friendly enough in passing, but he had a very different crowd in high school. Although we both loved the dark music we were discovering, he was cool and I was awkward. As punks go, I was more Ian Curtis and he more Stewart Copeland (even if he longed to be Brian Setzer).
But he was in this online group, as it was started by his high school girlfriend (I feel like they made out in the hallway in the same spot for about three years), and it was really great getting to know him again. He very happy in his second marriage and was taking a 20th anniversary trip to the Balkans before taking his daughter off to her freshman year of college, but while there, he had a massive aneurysm. His wife was able to get him to a hospital but he had bled too much in the brain and it was understood to be unrecoverable. It took all sorts of diplomatic gymnastics to get him home, where he lingered in a coma for about six weeks before dying.
It was really weird that I was in this special group that was being given updates while the new was embargoed from being shared with the cooler folks he knew, but I filled in one or two mutual friends that I knew would like to reach out to his wife before his passing.
So yeah, if I appreciate social media for anything, it's been the opportunity to reconnect with some old classmates and being delighted to find out that they've grown up. But some, with whom I initially found to have matured beyond the assholes they were, couldn't help responding to catching up by eventually falling back into old grooves, re-establishing old cliques, being malicious to the weakest, and really regressing rapidly in their online personas, acting (and spelling) like they were back in fourth grade. Fuck that noise.
Anyhow, this was Eric, from my yearbook:
-
whippoorwill
- Posts: 4679
- Joined: Fri Dec 28, 2018 5:17 pm
Re: Loss
Sid Vicious I presume? :)
Re: Loss
Yes, stupid cracks about guys who die young take on a weird poignancy when coming from teenagers who don't yet fully appreciate how brutally relentless mortality is.