When You're The Last One in the Picture

One of the tasks that came with unloading my dead father’s house full of crap was sorting through old photos. He himself never cared about photos - he didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body.  The box was left by my mother, the family archivist who died two years before, and my father just shoved the photos into a closet to be dug up after he died.

Being the OCD type, I unpacked, sorted, labeled, and mounted the physical versions, scanned all of them into a digital library, then uploaded a few onto a public tree on Ancestry.com so distant and future family historians could have documentation of what people on the extended family tree looked like.

But one of the things that kept hitting at me as I handled those photos was: I’m the only one left in this picture.

It’s a humbling feeling, looking down at a past Christmas and seeing my parents, uncles, aunts, the odd cousin - all gone - except for me as a kid or teenager, beaming into the camera.

The feeling that came over me wasn’t grief, it was a perspective-shift that makes mortality less abstract, a physical reminder that one day someone will look at the exact same pictures and say, “Everyone in that picture is dead.”

The Death of Blogger Z-Man

I started reading blogs around 2002, which after reading a few I decided to start my own.  I blogged very regularly for the first ten years - about once a day - but have taken a lot of the old content down as it was too topical (political stuff which seems ancient now), too personal (hey look at this picture from Japan), or too revealing.  Remember blogging was before social media, so it was the outlet for everything.  Over the years social media took over, so the personal stuff is now on Facebook, microblogging on X, and so on.  Due to these changes I took a lot of my old posts down, so you will see 20-year-old posts to the right, but just a small fraction of what I wrote.

Today this blog is basically where I jot random thoughts as I flail about in retirement.

But although I got out of regular blog writing, I didn't stop reading blogs, some of them shown at the links to the right (a once very long list that gets shorter as writers move to social media, stop blogging, or in this case, die).   They are a part of my morning coffee ritual along with the news and stock market. 

One of my favorites was "Z-Man", a contemporary who did a lot of deep thinking into the political theory of the conservative movement.  I would say I aligned on about 90% of his political thinking, and being about the same age with similar histories (a business professional doing blogging on the side), made me feel close to him, and I looked forward to reading his weekday posts and listening to his podcast when I was on the road.

Around late June he didn't posts for a few days, which I figured was part of an extended July 4 weekend, but then the non-posting lasted three weeks...then four...then I got a bad feeling.  Doing some X searching I indeed found out he passed away of "natural causes" at the "ripe" age of 59.  Ouch.

What I am finding is that a lot of the people who started blogging some 20 years ago are dropping away as it was done mainly by adults - not young adults - at the time.  So along with ZMan there was American Digest writer Gerard Vanderleun (who I immensely enjoyed), and a few others who have passed away over the past few years.  

Just another example of mortality and change, which basically sucks.