Empty chairs
Sep. 9th, 2014 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceSad, lady? I could be sad. I could be bitterly morbid. I've always rather approved of that habit at certain conventions of an In Memoriam, a rollcall of the dead - the way that I approve of the Last Post and cenotaphs and Victorian cemeteries and funerary rites of all sorts - but just now I have a rollcall in my head, and that's too close.
It's not the first time for me; hell, it's not even the second time that death has been a relentless companion among my cohort. In the late eighties and early nineties it was a line we used, that we were too young to be going to so many funerals; and then a decade later breast cancer cut a swathe through the literary community of Newcastle, and I was once again losing friends in swift succession.
Now here we are again, and there they go: Iain and Joel and Jay and Graham, in little more than a year. They too were friends as well as colleagues, and each man's death diminishes me - but it's more than that. These guys could have served as the very definition of depth and breadth in the genre; their collective loss leaves it thinner, wanting, less well served. Diminished.
And yes, I know that other people will step up, to enrich the genre in other ways; and I know that this process is inherent and inevitable, that there's no point saying "People, stop that," because nothing will ever stop it this side of the singularity, which will come too late for me - and even so. I never sat at the same table with all four of them at once (though I certainly may have done with three) but apparently I have a sort of ongoing convention in my head, and the table I sit at is acquiring empty chairs, and I kind of want to snap "Don't sit there, that's taken!" in a sort of Banquo's-ghost reversal, saving seats for absent friends.
I guess what I'm saying is that I do not approve, and I am not resigned. Which I guess you probably knew, but hey.
It's not the first time for me; hell, it's not even the second time that death has been a relentless companion among my cohort. In the late eighties and early nineties it was a line we used, that we were too young to be going to so many funerals; and then a decade later breast cancer cut a swathe through the literary community of Newcastle, and I was once again losing friends in swift succession.
Now here we are again, and there they go: Iain and Joel and Jay and Graham, in little more than a year. They too were friends as well as colleagues, and each man's death diminishes me - but it's more than that. These guys could have served as the very definition of depth and breadth in the genre; their collective loss leaves it thinner, wanting, less well served. Diminished.
And yes, I know that other people will step up, to enrich the genre in other ways; and I know that this process is inherent and inevitable, that there's no point saying "People, stop that," because nothing will ever stop it this side of the singularity, which will come too late for me - and even so. I never sat at the same table with all four of them at once (though I certainly may have done with three) but apparently I have a sort of ongoing convention in my head, and the table I sit at is acquiring empty chairs, and I kind of want to snap "Don't sit there, that's taken!" in a sort of Banquo's-ghost reversal, saving seats for absent friends.
I guess what I'm saying is that I do not approve, and I am not resigned. Which I guess you probably knew, but hey.