RIP, Rina

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sauvin
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RIP, Rina

Post by sauvin » Thu Mar 16, 2017 7:55 am

A couple of days ago, I learned that one of the two girlfriends I’d had in high school passed away about a year and a half ago.
The news left me vaguely numb and feeling acutely guilty.

During the 40-odd years since Graduation Day, after we broke up, I’ve spoken with her exactly once, that I can remember, and that would have been long before I turned 25. In all the time since, I’ve thought of her in passing once or maybe twice in the course of an average year. Her memory just quietly slipped into the attic. I’d forgotten all about her.

This is wrong. Nobody deserves to be forgotten like that, not people like her. It’s wrong that it’s easier to remember the bully who put a cigarette out in my shoulder or the raging young monster who literally beat his girlfriend so badly she was [excreting] blood into her britches all the way to the ER.

She was bright, loving, fun-loving and funny. She played the piano much better than I did in those days, and had a singing voice you could listen to the whole weekend through. She danced and laughed - the girl absolutely loved a good laugh - and rarely (if ever) had anything bad to say about anybody. She was patient and understanding, and had a an abundance of generosity of spirit. And, yeah, well… um… she was really easy on the eyes when I knew her.

Man, it’d be really easy to spend many hours just remembering wonderful things about her, even after such a long time, and even with a head full of mouldering Swiss cheese.

She had unbelievable strength of character. Even though she’d gone on to found a fan club or two, become a singer, stage performer, composer, author and avid patron of the arts, she lived with a disability that left most of her joints feeling like they were full of broken glass. She was able to complain about folks being less than tolerant of her clogging the aisles in stores at shopping malls with her electric wheelchair without rancor or bitterness, or any hint of ill will towards them, and she didn’t let her disability stop her from attending hundreds of stage events, apparently doing quite a bit of performing herself along the way.

She lived.

And now, she’s gone. Somewhere between her 55th and 60th birthday, an infection gave her about three days of dreamless sleep, and then took away her constant pain forever, and for that I suppose I should be glad, but she also left behind a wonderful father, a loving brother, a boyfriend who’d been with her for goodness knows how many decades, and who knows how many friends, acquaintances and fans. Most of these people, I suspect, will be missing her acutely for a long number of years, maybe even for the rest of their lives, and for that, I’m far too sorry for words.

Her name was Rina (Hebrew: “joy”) for a very long list of reasons.

55 ain’t too young to be drifting away. We hear about it all the time, folks in their 40s or even their 30s dropping in their tracks because of bad hearts or busted blood vessels, and we say their deaths are “untimely” because reasonable folk won’t pass away until they’ve had a chance to bounce their grandchildren on their knees. We hear about folks of all ages being drawn slowly to their graves with unspeakably miserable badnesses like cancer or defunct kidneys, and we shake our heads slowly saying that although their deaths might have been “untimely”, we have to ask ourselves if maybe such people had sent up a prayer of thanks to their favourite deities as they knew they were drawing their final breaths.

It’s not like this is the first time I’ve lost people, but it’s always seemed such a remote thing before. I was “arguably” around when my grandfather died, but I was drinking so much at that point of my life I often didn’t really even know what year it was, and the rest of my grandfolk passed on while I was Away. One of my supervisors died in a traffic accident a few years ago, and that was kind of bad (had she reached her 30th birthday yet?), but I didn’t really know her. I didn’t really know the 20-something young man who didn’t survive crossing the railroad tracks on the way to work, either, but that was worse because a LOT of the folk I work with went to high school with him.

Is it selfish of me to have preferred that Rina read MY obituary, rather than me reading hers? The other girlfriend I’d had in high school, her, I DO remember, at least once every single blessed day since the beginning of Time itself. If I ever have to read Anne’s obituary, it’ll be Game Over, man. Game Over.

The nice thing about having a big, bushy beard the colour of driven snow is in little things like not having to fish out a passport in order to buy a beer or a pack of smokes, but the curse is that I have now “officially” begun to survive my family, friends and classmates to things other than traffic or hunting accidents. People just shrug and say that it’s been like this ever since Eve chucked Adam an apple, or since long before great-great-great-great Grandaddy fell out of his tree and discovered the joys of grilled venison. This is just the natural order of things, that when your beard turns white, you get to start dreading opening the papers to the obituaries or clicking on random links in social media, because somebody else you might or might not have even remembered has left us.

55 IS too young to be losing their memories, though. People who made you laugh, people who made you cry, people who introduced you to this kind of cuisine or that kind of music or movie, or helped you understand why and how you got to be the fine, upstanding curmudgeonly old [HONK] that you’ve become today. Every single one of them, and not just the major players like Anne or Rina or Ilana, but also some of the people who’d only been in your life for a few days or a few months, or lived on the periphery of your daily life for a few years, folks like Colleen or Joanna or Kathleen, or even that cute little blonde girl you’d only known a single night after a few dozen rounds at the bar, who’d laughed when you accidentally ripped off a seismic [EXPULSION], said “don’t worry about it” and [FWEET!] your brains out anyway.

41 years, man, where did all the time go!? It was just yesterday I drove Rina down the river road through a winter storm, me with a driver’s license I’d just gotten a few months before and in a car big enough to have a walk-in closet and a patio. She sang “Muskrat Love” along with the radio and made Helen Reddy’s voice sound like a muskrat being tortured.

Mortality probably has quite a few Life Lessons ( ™ ) to teach us, among which is that tempus doesn’t just fidget. It puts rockets on its sleigh and blasts off into the night at twenty or thirty gees.

What it’s teaching me, as I work through the shock of having learned of Rina’s passing, is that it’s wrong to get so caught up in the minutiae of life that you forget the people who’ve been part of your life – part of who you ARE.

And the people who ARE still in your life? Tell them you love them before they get away from you, because they WILL get away from you, and then all you’ll have to live with is ghosts.
Last edited by sauvin on Thu Mar 16, 2017 8:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Obstreperous dad-gummed language policy :sigh:
Fais tomber les barrières entre nous qui sommes tous des frères

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ltroifanatic
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Re: RIP, Rina

Post by ltroifanatic » Thu Mar 16, 2017 10:59 am

My sincerest condolences.She sounds like a special person and the world will be a little poorer in her passing.
Please Oskar.Be me for a little while.

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a_contemplative_life
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Re: RIP, Rina

Post by a_contemplative_life » Thu Mar 16, 2017 12:26 pm

If you haven't done so already, maybe this would be a good time to connect with her remaining family members and tell them what a great person she was and convey a few stories they've probably never heard. I remember one of the best things about my dad's wake was hearing from some of his childhood friends who told me what they did as kids. It was information I'd never known about, and probably would never have known about, had he not died.
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gattoparde59
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Re: RIP, Rina

Post by gattoparde59 » Thu Mar 16, 2017 9:09 pm

If you haven't done so already, share your remembrance posted here with the friends and family of Rina. I think they would appreciate it.

I'll break open the story and tell you what is there. Then, like the others that have fallen out onto the sand, I will finish with it, and the wind will take it away.

Nisa

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JToede
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Re: RIP, Rina

Post by JToede » Fri Mar 17, 2017 1:02 am

A few years ago I found out my best friend growing up had passed away a couple of years before, we had lost touch around 11 grade, he moved across town and we both got busy with life and such, after graduation I started my 27 year planetary Walkabout and hadn't seen him since then, I would hear things through the grapevine, but I was usually across the country or on the other side of the world. My sister actually told me, it was like " wait? what? how in the world ? when?" I understand how you feel, been there. Accept my deepest condolences. No one is truly gone as long as we remembers them.
Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire.

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