There is a kind of disorientation that comes with outliving people who were supposed to outlive you.
I live with a serious illness. For years, the implicit social contract has been clear, if unspoken: I am the one being cared for. I am the fragile one. I am the variable in other people’s lives. I am the reason I have a medical case manager, an adjusted schedule for living, and a ‘what if’ contingency plan.
Strangely, mortality has a logic to it. The ill go before the well. The old before the young. That is the order of things. Mortality is simplistic, except, of course, when it isn’t.