The recent buds relax and spread, / Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Live long enough in media to see multiple of the places you worked just cease to exist. Live long enough in media to have a nemesis list related to the disappearance of those places. Live long enough in media to know you are on someone's nemesis list. To know you are someone's nemesis list.
Chronic pain is, above all, tiresome. There is the literal exhaustion that comes from both the performance of wellness and the adaptations required to do so. There is the mental exhaustion that accompanies the necessity of trying to break out of the cycle - the hours spent filling in the same forms over and over for doctors and specialists; the insurance follow-ups; the repeated, tedious questions; the time spent on hold or in waiting rooms. The frustration of not being able to do the things you want and need to do - of being dis-abled. Of wondering when you should tick the box. Dis-ability. Feels big. Feels permanent. Feels like it's something that comes for us all eventually. It is wellness that is temporary.
Live long enough that it takes more than one hand to count the friends who've died, suddenly. And the parents of friends who have died. Be grateful for the friends from a very specific time were committed photographers and that they, despite time and distance and technology, held on to those photos. Photographers are public memoirists.
Rest in peace CB.
Attribution
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
— from The Trees by Philip Larkin