whose turn is it?

I always seem to feel so guilty if I haven't kept in touch with people, someone I should phone or write (usually a snail mail letter because these people are not into the techie age),  or maybe someone I should have over for coffee, tea, wine,  or some appropriate meal. I transfer names from list to list and it takes a while to get to them, sometimes quite a long while, but every once in that same while I wonder, why don't they think of me? Why don't they feel guilty about not calling me?  Why am I always the one to reach out?  If you are nodding your head, then you're one of the reachers and not one of the takers.  

But I wonder, would I feel any better if someone reached out to me? Probably not.  I'd probably feel more guilty.  Is it possible to get through a week or even a day without feeling an obligation to do something for someone?  I remember years ago when my older daughter was in high school, she paused before she left one morning and asked me what I was going to do that day.  And I told her about someone who was ill and needed soup, so I'd take some, and someone else - I forget all - but I had a list.  

"You mean you spend time thinking about what you can do for others?"  She looked at me in horror.  "I"m never going to do that."

She does, though. Did I lay it on her?

duck!

For some time now I have compared myself to a duck in a shooting gallery, surrounded by other ducks that keep disappearing as they get shot down. In the past week, two more ducks have flown.  One was my former next-door neighbour in Stratford. We apparently had a lot in common: four children each, one of each family born on the exact same day/date.  I think she moved from Stratford before I did, but after my husband died.  She was very kind to me, out of a well-intentioned pity. We really did not have much in common, just surface similarities.  Forty years after my  husband's death, we were reduced to Christmas cards, polite nods to our distant past. She died last week, still with an almost intact husband.  I mean, they were both on walkers, struggling.  He couldn't help her when she fell on the floor with her heart attack.  I've been picturing that all week, running it in my mind like a scene from a movie.

The other duck lived in my apartment building, dying at home after putting up a valiant and vain struggle.  (It's never a struggle; it's always a lose-lose situation.)  She emerged from my really distant past, having been part of my Winnipeg milieu, connected with my brother.  When my brother died about four years ago, she wrote me a beautiful letter; she was the only person in the east who even knew I had a brother. I went to her funeral, memorial service, that is, no coffin, just some sincere, heart-felt and informative memories recalling her life.  Her husband is also still living.  I do feel great compassion for these two men. Like me, they are surviving ducks, but worse off.

Little by little, life is being prized from our grasp, finger by finger. I used to think my mother was grand-standing or seeking pity when she commented on how little time she had left, though she was not sick.  She would give me some instruction, something to remember when she was gone.  I do that, too, now, and I recognize the words for what they mean.  I am not seeking sympathy, I'm just pointing out a fact, not so much to my listener (if she's listening) but to myself, reminding myself of the fact of my mortality, ever looming. Memento mori, and all that. 

I do wish spring would come.