December Challenge, Day 8: What Matters

Today I found out that an old co-worker and friend died. Not sure when he died, but to me it's as if he died today. I had not seen him in a few years, but with people who you don't see, it's as with Schrödinger's cat. You assume they're ok unless otherwise told...

This got me thinking about a very disturbing statistic that I've noticed this year. 2015 is the year that I've been to most funerals in my life. Until this year, the most funerals I'd attended in any given year had been 1-2 at the most... This year I attended 5 funerals, and I did not attend an additional 2 which I really would have liked to attend, because I could not physically attend, as they were held far away from my city, with no time to travel.

None of these were of people specially close to me, but all of them were of people very close to people very dear to me. In all cases I had a very dear friend or family member loose someone close and dear to them. A father, a mother, a brother, an uncle, a son, a best friend... People who I love lost someone they loved dearly and in some cases it changed their lives forever...

I was in the process of thinking about my "December challenge" topic of the day: "What matters" and it became so obvious and clear... Being alive, being healthy. This is what really matters. I would even go further... what really matters is having those close to you, those who matter to you be alive and healthy.

We take this for granted, we believe this is "normal". We don't even think about it, and worry about nonsense, get worked up with trivial things and stress out about minute troubles... until someone we love is faced with a disease, or has an accident. And then we realise all of that crap is really insignificant and we wish we had payed more attention to the person we now miss... We wish we could have them for just one more day, one more conversation... Wish we could call them or email them... just to see how they're doing...

It's too late to call or write to my friend... But I have many friends who I can call and find out about
... And this is what matters...

Alfredo, a good guy... a good friend!