Aging

Another sign of aging. 

Today's LATimes has a feature story on Luis Zapata. In the opening, it mentions that he died earlier this month. 

As I see that, it just adds to the losses evoked by the story. As I've written previously, Kieran knew Zapata and, at my request, got him to autograph a book for Victor, who loaned the book and it never came back. Any mention of Zapata brings Kieran to mind. He died many years ago. 

So, even before getting very far into the story, I'm feeling the loss of Kieran, of Zapata, and of the autographed book. 

And I realize that this is just another sign of aging. More and more things will inevitably remind me of people and things now gone.

Or, as Julia Wick writes in the LATimes about a supercentenarian, "To defy death is to endure a long onslaught of loss."

Or, as Lawrence Wright writes in The New Yorker about Austin, "If you live long enough in a place, it becomes haunted by ghosts: memories of events and friends long gone still inhabit spaces that have been levelled and covered over by the unstoppable newness. It’s a form of double vision: you see things that are no longer there."