Grief

            I am the only son of a couple who deeply wanted a child. It is a great blessing that I have paid for over and over.
          My parents were older than most of my contemporaries my father was 42 when I was born and my mother nearly 37  , My father's mother my grandmother was also a member of the family and she was 78 when I arrived.
           My father had retired from active employment and spent his time studying the stock market and investing.My mother  was a member of the Eastern Star which was mainly a group of ladies who were older and did good works in the community.
           My father's friends at the market were almost exclusively elderly retired men who pursed investing  and were successful or not as the world would give them the insight to do so.      
           This background narrative is to illustrate why aside from my contemporaries  many of the people that I knew were considerably older than I was.
           When my father would take me to the brokerage firms office. ,in those days called bucket shops after the quaint custom in their early beginnings of overturning buckets to sit on.
           As a small child in the presence of so many elderly men who were often grandfathers themselves I became something of a mascot .
           One of the examples  of many stories of joy that come to me from that era was of an retired Chicago Irish cop. He was 6' 4" in his seventies , he and his wife had  had no children and he loved kids. He wold place me upon his shoulder and we would wander around the office  and as a little  seven   year old I got to look down on and into all of the inner workings of the world around me,
          I loved him.
         As is the way of all things he died  several years after I was in junior high school and my parents wishing to shield me from the horror of death , a common practice of the era, did not let me know of his passing.
            His was one story of many, all of these old men and the wives who I got to know have proceeded me in death and I have not had a chance to say goodbye.
            I am now the age that many of them were and their  memories come to me more and more often.  Especially when I have been weakened by the latest set back in my bodies relation to cancer.
           A good friend and I were conversing about the subject and during the conversation she reframed  what I had been calling sadness into grief.
           I have never really said goodbye to so many of my lost friends who I loved so dearly.
           One would ave thought that a hospice volunteer of so many years would have seen it in a flash but  such was not the case for me.
          So now when these wonderful old friends appear to me in my memories I do what I did not do for so many years,  I grieve.