Pamela Jean Owens off-line

When I first started a personal blog last year, not having any real plan in mind for it, someone who had meant a lot to me had just died. Not surprisingly, I decided to write about her. I was blogging every Sunday night, or that was the plan, and by the following weekend I had gotten news of the deaths of three more people important to me. And again the next week. Suddenly it seemed like, one after another, all my teachers were dying. Then I realized that I was experiencing the same thing that everyone my age must be experiencing.

I had already known that my Aunt Eva, who died in 2004, was the first of what will inevitably be eight deaths of beloved relatives from the World War II generation. Since all my aunts and uncles are now in their eighties, most likely their deaths all will come in the next ten to fifteen years. Since nearly all of my ancestors lived long lives, well into their eighties or nineties, I’m not expecting any less of my immediate aunts, uncles, or parents. But they are only eight of many elders of their generation who have enriched my life and made me who I am. Odds are, I will outlive most or all of them, if I follow in my ancestors’ footsteps. Now that I have a more sophisticated blog, I can make this a category of its own. If I add some research to my personal musings, I hope it can become a book. If it sells, it will be a book with sequels, assuming I live long enough, which I am planning to do. I invite your comments. Feel free to post reflections on the teachers in your life who are dying. We of the baby boomers come from a generation of giants ahead of us. I don’t intend to let them be forgotten.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 9:12 pm and is filed under All My Teachers Are Dying. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.