Season of changes
So many old friends gone now
The leaves fade and fall
The round of leaving parties at this time of year gets to be one of the more depressing features of expat life. Of course, there are a lot of new arrivals around this time too. It ought to be a great time for making new friends. But some of the losses are irreplaceable. I thought last year was bad, but this year... this year, well, there are suddenly two (three, four) very big holes in my life.
2 comments:
As an expat myself, though one might comment that I have the luxury of being expatirated in a developed society, a Western Culture, I empathise with the Haiku. In my case the passing of time each year and the holes left are those of people I knew who have passed away for good. Each year, inevitably as we all age, the gaps left seem more pressing on one's immediate company of good souls, this year for me was awful, again, as my mentor and patron when I first came to the Colonies, died in Boston albeit at a venerable age and he did enjoy a massive write up in the NYT as he was quite famous.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?n=alan-haberman&pid=151877025&fhid=11396
More than this, the number of permanent departures grows each year, and then it get's increasingly morbid in pub or home dialogue with "do you remeber such and such, or this or that, or when xx parson did this, or that" raking up memories and recalling better days for history is always veiwed, in personal recollections, as better than now.
Welcome, English Bob. Sorry to hear about the loss of your friend.
I am - I hope - still some way away from that zone where I will be losing my friends in that way; although my brother died young, and I do have a number of friends who are a decade or two older than me.
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