My grandfather died on the second day of this month.
It wasn't a surprise, really. He's been in and out of hospital for the past few years, even before the pandemic. He didn't die of COVID-19, though. He got struck with it, but powered through. He was strong enough to get vaccinated thrice. What he had was a long term respiratory problem. As the story goes, it was all those nights he spent in his youth developing film and printing photographs in a dark room in that home in Caloocan he shared with my late grandmother for decades. Either that, or it was his work at a paper factory, although I never really knew what he did there.
It wasn't a surprise. He died at 91. But he had just celebrated his birthday two weeks before he passed. It was the first time the clan was able to gather to celebrate the occasion. Well, not everyone. I wasn't there. It didn't seem like a good idea, considering that he just got out from the hospital that very weekend.
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Depending on where you sit, considering how things are laid out around you, you're probably up to your gills with calls to urgency, calls to panic, calls to arms.
It used to happen once in a while. Then it happened a little more often. That scenario was inevitable, perhaps a downside of the times. We just have more access to information these days. Next thing we know, everyone is asking us to pay attention, rolling out the "breaking news" chyrons and the red exclamation points at every opportunity. The world is burning, and you must fight.
And then it becomes a din. Everything sounds like an alarm. Everything, therefore, sounds like nothing at all.
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This time, my idle thoughts are somewhere more specific: people who die "after a fall".
Sometimes I read articles about prominent people who die "after a fall". Often they're of old age, so I have this image of people who slip and fall and... die?
It makes sense if they hit their head badly and fail to recover. Or maybe they fall from the stairs and fail to, well, recover. But for some reason I imagine them falling and cracking their hips. Now, I know little about old age or hip injuries, but I'm pretty certain that immobilizes you for a while. Maybe it triggers a sequence of events somewhere that leads to fatal consequences. I don't know.
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The last thing I wrote on here was a riff on how, unusually, I wrote eight entries last month. Well, here we are: my first entry for this month, a little over three weeks into the month, and with seven days to go before the end of it.
So much for record-breaking.
To be honest, I did have something to write about. I still do, I think. But you know how life gets in the way and forces you to live it, to go with it, rather than to write about it from a distance?
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