Death and marriage

A colleague was just talking about how someone she knew had died and the dead woman was only a few years older than her.
Death is a funny thing, after experiencing it first with my aunty, then my granddad then my nana, I've come to be complacent about it.
Old people die and funerals are there to celebrate their lives.
Of course, it's different when someone my age dies, it's confusing and terribly sad, it hurts at the very core of myself.
The thing is, it must be scary as someone in their 40's-80's when your friends start dying.
For me, death is a far away thing, it happens to old people but not to my friends and not to me quite yet.
Right now, the scary thing is who will be the first of my friends to get married? Who will be the first to have a baby?
Those are the scariest things I have to deal with at my age, worrying, why are they getting married at 18 and I haven't even found a partner?
But as you get older and you and your friends are all married with children, death is the next concern.
Who's health is deterriorating? Who will die first? Who will die next?
It must be scary when your first friend dies.
I'm at a point where friends are everything to me, especially alone in a small town, they remind me that life is okay so the thought of them dying is terrifying and so so sad, it is that feeling where your heart just hurts because you never ever want it to happen.
I wouldn't know how to deal with it.
I said to a friend recently that if she died I would quit my job and cry for days and she, being very practical said if I did that, she would come back and haunt me.
I feel like I couldn't survive if she, or any of my other friends died because it's incomprehensible to me at this stage.
Old people die but not young people.
Right now, my biggest concern is marriage, who's gonna get married?
I spoke to a colleague once about her friend's beginning to get married, she's 21 and her friends, at her age were just beginning to start getting married and beginning to have children.
She felt scared about it, sure, they're growing up but she said it wouldn't make her get married any sooner, also fair enough.
I hope the death of a friend is something that is a long way off for me, particularly of natural causes. Of course suicide could happen at any time but I always hope none of my friends would be selfish enough to do that to me or their families.
The stages of life are so interesting, the things you worry about at different ages.
I'm concerned that if I'm working now, I'll never be able to stop working so I'll never study more, never travel and never have kids. Just work.
But at a different stage in my life, those concerns will be entirely irrelevant.
Who knows.

Varelai.