I see dead friends

Quite often, I'll think I see a person I know who has died. A healthy looking blond guy will be standing on a corner with his buddies, and I'll think, "Is that Nick?" Nick is my cousin, younger than me, who died of heart failure at age 19. He passed away, two years after a heart transplant. I never ran into him when he was alive, because he lived in Stayton. Now I think I see him, turning a corner downtown, walking up Hawthorne with his buddies.

Other times, I'll see a dark haired guy riding a bike or sitting at Stumptown, and I'll think "Eliot?" Eliot is a guy I dated for 2 months about 5 or 6 years ago, who died while swimming in the Pacific Ocean a year and a half ago. While he and I were terribly mismatched, he remained friends with Carol and Bettina, and I ran into him around town a lot. He's gone now, but I swear I see him out of the corner of my eye. A closer look reveals an obvious stranger, one who doesn't remotely resemble Eliot.

I suppose, because they died early, because their kind of death is shocking, they have been burned in the forefront of my brain. They were gone so suddenly, unlike my Grampa and Grandma, who died old and frail, so expectedly.

Around the same time that I dated Eliot, or before that, there was a rash of motorcycle accidents that killed 3 young men in the middle of the night within 6 months of each other. I went to the funeral of one the guys, and it was the most heartbreaking ceremony I've been witness to. Everyone was devastated and shocked because he had been picked from the earth in a single moment, and the anguish was intense. I attended the funeral with my boss from PSU, because it was my co-worker's boyfriend who had died, and he was crying throughout the service along with everyone else.

My mom almost died last weekend, what would have been a sudden and early death, and I wonder if I would have seen her on the street two years from now. A dark haired woman, looking into her purse on the street. "Mom?", I'd wonder.