Such a long, long time to be gone, And a short time to be there...

The older I get, the more I think about how short life is. I guess everyone pretty much goes through this stage in their 40's. The last 10 years have flown by at a very scary rate of speed. It blows my mind that 20 years ago we were about to go through the worse earthquake in San Francisco since 1906. TWENTY YEARS. In 1989 when we got married, it was only 20 years since Woodstock. Now it's forty years since Woodstock. One of the things that really gets me is whenever I see a cemetery headstone. It usually only contains the person's dates of birth & death, sometimes a little more detail...'beloved husband and father' or 'WW2 Veteran', but not much. Nothing to illustrate how the person was in life. It's like, you go through life and it's all for nothing. And the more time passes, the more people are forgotten. My dad's headstone makes me sad because he was so much more than just a WW2 veteran. And the rest of us have gone on with our lives because there's nothing else for us to do. Death is a certain. I do try to put this stuff out of my head, as it's pretty depressing.

Unfortunately, the other day, I was painfully reminded of this.


I have a lot of Facebook friends...almost 600. So of course it's impossible to keep up with every single person, especially when a lot of the contacts are gamers.

Over the weekend, I was trying to think of some way to help Axe out, and remembered that one of my FB friends, Dani Bonnici, lives in Cape Town. She posted some beautiful photos of a thunderstorm over Cape Town in the spring. I thought maybe Dani would have some ideas of places that might be hiring, or know someone in the arts, as she runs a very popular & successful ceramics shop. I went over to her profile, and ignoring the many wall posts, I went straight to the link to her ceramics shop. http://www.ceramicsafrica.co.za/ It was there that I read this awful message:

"We are sorry to say that Dani suffered a massive stroke and on the 26th of June she passed away, all our love and prayers go out to Dani, her son and her family. Her family would like you all to know that the business will still be open."

To say that I was floored would be an understatement. I went back to her Facebook profile and started reading all of the posts. People are still leaving "I miss you" messages on her Wall. She was very young...not much older than me. I read all the way back to right after she died, about 3 months' worth of posts. I eventually had to stop because I was getting more and more distressed, not just because she died, but also that I had no idea she was gone, and had been for 3 months. Our lives go on and hers was painfully cut short. She will never see all those "I miss you" wall posts and the outpouring of love from her family and friends. If that's not a page out of the "live life to the fullest" book, I don't know what is.

RIP Dani. I'm so sorry that it took me this long to find out you were gone.