Death and Retirement Homes

For some reason today, I distinctly recalled that one particular moment of my sophomore year of high school where my encounter with death changed my perspective on suburbia:

I was walking around the track as one of our daily physical education activities with my friends ToniAnn and Edward. Mind you, this activity had become an every-other-day occurrence of philosophizing and generally talking or complaining about our difficult lives as 15 and 16 year old individuals, and it was something that I looked forward to for a good portion of that semester because I always seemed to have a good time.

There was that day, however, where I witnessed something particularly unusual and slightly unsettling. There was a retirement home next to my high school, and for most of my life the concept of a retirement home seemed a far away abstraction of the end of life since my grandparents had never been in a home themselves. Walking around the track that day, we witnessed one of the back doors to the complex open up and a couple of men in white wheel out a stretcher with a white sheet covering a lumpy mass that I could only assume was a body.

In that moment, I thought of how that dead person must have come to live and die in that place, wondering if their family lived in one of the nearby neighborhoods or whether any of their grandchildren or great-grandchildren attended my high school. It made me realize that with schools and offices and churches and restaurants an retirement homes all within a couple of square miles of each other, one could go a good portion of their lives without ever seeing the outside world.

This thought scared me, the idea of growing and learning and living and dying all in one place. I figured then that a lot of people, like myself, tell themselves growing up that they're going to go out and see the world, only to inevitably delay those plans indefinitely and forever remain grounded. I deeded then that I should really commit myself to at least seeing other parts of the county (maaaaybe the world), how other people and cultures live and thrive, if only for the personal learning experience.