A friend's father passed away recently. The exact emotions that come to my mind... I have yet to find accurate descriptors. When a mutual friend told me this, I had few words to say. In some ways, I'm so calloused to death, what we euphemistically call "expiring" in my industry. Expired, just like that carton of milk whose remnants I dumped down the sink last week. Expired, like the coupons for Lysol I've been meaning to use. It's odd that these two usages of the same word connote predictability; death is more often than not unpredictable. But I think it's this implication of scheduled expiry that mitigates the sense of gravity when using the word "expire" to represent this concept; I've framed death as a planned and programmed event. When a faceless patient expires, it's just some unceremonious checkout from the hospital. Words were sparse only because the passing of someone I didn't know--this time faceless and even nameless--no longer has much impact.

And while this inurement has made death easier to deal with in general, there still is sting when I consider that the one who has expired is the parent of a peer and not some patient I've worked up at the hospital. And to think that parents the age of mine are expiring is a scary thought--perhaps from a self-centred perspective. It leaves me feeling somewhat helpless, knowing that I have so little control on the larger things that matter to me in life. While I'm glad that the emotional side of me can still peer through the tepid indifference that I've developed, that indifference has left me numbed and unable to really describe how I feel. It's not that I have little grief for my friend. I feel for him in earnest, I really do. It's sad that I have to reassure myself of this.