My Dad died when he was 91. In his life he was a well-liked man; he had many friends and acquaintances who called him a friend. If he had any enemies, I never knew about it. Yet at his funeral he didn’t have a large number of people in the church. Most of his friends and relatives had died years before, and he had occasionally mentioned how difficult that was for him.
I feel the same way. Just this week Mrs. Carter and Sandra Day O’Connor died. They weren’t exactly “friends,” but they were decent people, and I felt a twinge of sadness. I certainly didn’t agree with many of O’Connor’s opinions, but unlike some present day Supreme Court justices, she was a reasonable and conscientious justice.
On the other hand, it was nice to see that Henry Kissinger died. No one who lives to be a hundred, as Kissinger did, is probably all bad. After all, Kissinger did help to negotiate a nuclear arms limitation with the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the thousands of Americans and Vietnamese who died for his “realist” political goals, the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians who died, the thousands of East Pakistanis who died, the Chileans who “disappeared”–that is a major part of his legacy. It gives me pleasure that I outlived him.
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