I found out today that someone I graduated from high school with died earlier this month.

I had only 42 people in my graduating class. It was a Catholic high school and we were the next to last graduating class. Mismanagement is probably the primary reason the school closed, at least that’s how it felt at the time.

I hated high school—I’d even go so far as to say I despised it. I was painfully geeky, and brought down upon myself all the teasing that being smart and ugly brought you in high school.

My class has not held a class reunion, despite the fact that it’s been almost 17 years since graduation, and I’m not sure if I’d want to go if there was a reunion. Maybe things would be different after all this time, but the idea of seeing some of my classmates again gives me a sick to my stomach feeling—as if all the intervening years had dropped away to make me who I was then, instead of who I am now.

And today I find out that Amy has died, and it brings the realization that despite there being so few of us, there are those I graduated with that I hardly knew. I pulled out my yearbook when I got home. Found what she’d written to me. “I don’t really know you, but you seem like a nice girl…”

It doesn’t make me feel bitter, as much as it makes me feel sad and small. Sad, because I never knew her, and now never will. Small, because part of me still doesn’t want to know my former classmates. Small, because I fear that I’ll have turned out to be just as pathetic as they expected.

Oddly enough, the mortality part of it doesn’t bother me as much as I’d have thought it would. I’ve made huge changes in my life in past years—quitting smoking, reducing my drinking, increasing my exercise—all in theory to improve my health and extend my life. Except that for the most part it’s the short term benefits of those acts that have been important, not the long. Smoking seemed to exacerbate colds, exercise makes me feel better physically and mentally, and the drinking went out the door with the smoking.

In my gerontology class several semesters ago, we were supposed to tell the class how we imagined our old age. I, like several others in my class, can’t imagine my old age. Such a thing is almost surreal to me, like the idea of interstellar travel. I have no idea that tomorrow will bring, so it makes little sense to worry about things even further down the road. (Despite that I still set aside extra money into my retirement fund each paycheck. I may be blind to the future, but I’m not foolish.)

I was told that Amy left behind three children, at least one of whom will never really know their mother, and that does sadden me. Somehow, those children and their loss seem far more real to me than their mother.

And that too is sad.