So I mentioned in the last numbered post (50?) that a friend had died in August. She had been a client of my horsemanship instruction for the past year and a few months, mostly for emotional therapy, as her mother had terminal cancer and she was not coping well with the impending loss. Horses have a healing energy, which science is only just quantifying now, but she definitely reaped the benefits of regular lessons and fun rides. In the process of sharing some of my life philosophies with her, we became pretty good friends.
She was loud, opinionated, hyper-intelligent and pushy: some of my favourite things, but also some of the things I have the hardest time dealing with in other people. I am a peacemaker, by inclination: I grew up in an abusive family, but after my joints failed, I lost a lot of my inclination to fight with people, or the world. Injustice is still a major hotbutton, but I am much more inclined to pick my battles carefully and marshal my combative energies to have the most effect when I choose to spend them.
Caro was a fighter. She took the world on with her teeth fully bared, expecting attack from every quarter, and as should be obvious, she often found the fights. She was brusque and abrasive and not quiet about her opinions, and a lot of people have a hard time dealing with people like that, especially women like that.
That said, she did some phenomenally dumb things, too, and then sought my advice after the fact. I gave her the best advice I could, and never judged her for those choices she had made, but I was aware, more and more as time went on, that this was a person who was not really all there. I knew she struggled with depression and motivation, but I had no idea, until it was much too late, just how hard that struggle was for her.
She took her own life in the week after the eclipse, August 21, 2017. A friend found her, and I was in the loop from the get go, because the note she had left named me as her heir. That was a shock to my system. Her mother had died in September, she still had surviving siblings, but she had consigned what to do with all of her belongings to me. And she had a LOT of belongings. So six truckloads came back to my place (I still wasn't fully unpacked from my move in May), and four truckloads were donated to various thrifts stores and charities, and two truckloads went to the dump. A month later I was called upon to help clear out her storage locker, so another truckload came home with me.
I have spent the last five months sorting, divvying and sending along the belongings of someone I have known for a only very short period of time, relatively speaking. I have learned a lot about her as an individual in that time, but also about myself. I have also outgrown my attachment to SO MUCH STUFF.
I am still emptying my house of all the extra things. It has become crystal clear to me that one of the worst things about our modern western society is our addiction to stuff. For Christmas, I spent the absolute minimum amount of time and money shopping for STUFF to give to people, in token. I feel like the less stuff I have, by far the happier I will be, so I am divesting my life of so much. It's also a gift to my sons, when I go, I hope to god I am not leaving all these unimportant items for them to find homes for.
In getting to know Caro, I had told her about SWG, and how it had been a haven for me in my worst days. What I loved about the game, what I wished I could improve about the game, how much I had enjoyed and even still enjoyed being a Senator for Beast Mastery, all of that. I even attended a Senate meeting from her house, as I was overnighting there the day after one of the big events I had run. I loaned her the disks and got her machine talking to the Legends server, and we tried to get her playing on her own, as I both wanted my friend to play with me, and I thought it could do her some good. (Bear in mind, all of this was her idea, and knowing how similar of people we are, I agreed it might be a great outlet for her.)
Well, she seemed to have some issue getting signed onto the Legends forums, and after not trying very hard, she gave up. She kept the game installed on her system, so I could play on those occasions I was over, but she never did get signed up and logged in. I wish she had, but then again, perhaps it's better for my mourning process that I don't have her digital memories to deal with as well as all of her physical ones.
TL;DR? No one needs 120 tee shirts. No one needs every old text book for every class you ever took, the pattern for every craft you started, or the complete collection of coloured glass bottles you were saving for that one project. And no one wants to deal with your junk when you are gone. So a) get a real will, b) live a life with a LOT less stuff. and c) let your friends know how much you value them, while they are alive.
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