Sad thoughts about death

[DavidDvorkin]

Periodically, I get an updated directory of the people in the division I worked in at NASA on Apollo, maintained by one of those people. Every time, I morbidly go through it to see who's died since the last update. We were all young, but I was one of the younger ones, so it's not suprising that so many of us have died. It's depressing, though. 400,000 people worked on Apollo, in total. I wonder how many of them are still alive. I wonder when the last of us will kick the bucket.

[leftieNanner]

1. I grew up in San Francisco

and I check the obituaries on a regular basis to find out if any of my friends, or my parents' friends have died.

I feel the same way about all of the WWII vets passing on. It won't be long before there aren't any more left.

[NurseJackie]

2. I hear ya.

I used to gently tease my parents for reading the obituaries. Now I'm doing the same thing... just to see if I knew anyone... knowing that the Grim Reaper will one day find me too.

I'm not eagerly anticipating my own death... but all things considered... as a non-believer, I certainly don't fear death as I once did. It's just an end. Not a transition. Everything ends. Everything dies.

But, it's still difficult to say goodbye and farewell when it happens to our friends, family and colleagues.

[monmouth4]

3. What is also sad is reading the deaths of friends of your kids. Many of them once were in my home.

Sometimes it's cancer, sometimes an overdose. My kids are in their late 50s, still sad.

[DavidDvorkin]

4. Oh, yes.

[hunter]

5. My grandfather was an Army Air officer in World War II and later and Apollo Project engineer.

He didn't talk much about the war, a dirty job that needed doing, a lot of it secretly, but he was immensely proud to have created a few bits of metal that took men to the moon and back. He would always talk about that. A few bits of his metal are in the Smithsonian.

I have his Apollo 8 flown metal medallion.

"In appreciation for your contribution to the Apollo Saturn project the Apollo 8 crew carried metal in this medallion on man's first flight to the Moon"

There were 200,000 made, but for reasons unknown to me, that was one of his favorite Apollo Project mementos. I've also got a few spacecraft parts that didn't pass quality control.

I quit high school for college fully intending to be an engineer, but engineering was still a guys world in the 'seventies, and I didn't get along with the other guys. I switched majors to biology my third year which was deeply traumatic for everyone involved.

[DavidDvorkin]

7. I believe I have one of those Apollo 8 medallions, too

My memory of that mission is of days spent without sleep because the mission was sprung on us and we had little time to do all the work.

[TexasBushwhacker]

6. I'm 62. I keep in touch wit my high school class on Facebook

We had a pretty big graduating class; around 800. But it seems lately someone dies every week or 2. Our numbers are dwindling rapidly.

[DavidDvorkin]

8. I went to my 55th HS reunion a couple of years ago

Last edited Mon Feb 25, 2019, 09:26 PM - Edit history (1)

About 1/3 of the class had died.