Just found out my Junior High girlfriend died last year of brain cancer. Fuck you, "mortality."

[Miles Archer]

I'm now officially at the point where the little Marcia Bradys and Laurie Partridges I chased all over the map in my school days are developing chronic diseases and dying. One died of brain cancer, another also died of cancer a year ago, and a third has developed chronic MS. I saw a picture of her on Facebook the other day, getting around with a cane.

For all of my fellow DUers in their 20s and 30s, carpe motherfucking DIEM. Do not waste a MINUTE. Life is going to come up on you one day like a freight train and that is not the time to have regrets about the things you didn't do and the people you failed to love...including yourself.

[Rhythm]

1. No kidding... gotta carpe the fuck out of every diem...

There rarely are second-chances...
And no one wants to spend their last moments in regret of shoulda-coulda-woulda...

[WinkyDink]

2. C M-F D! That's for DAMN sure.

[Initech]

3. Yeah I hear that.

One of my coworkers passed about a month ago and I've been having the same attitude since then. You only live once, live life to the fullest.

[Rhiannon12866]

4. Excellent reminder, thank you.

I had two close friends I met at work, were always so supportive of me, drove all the way to Boston (we're in NE NY) to visit me in the hospital when I had surgery there, twice. We also tried to be supportive of other coworkers, would show up at wakes and funerals for family members. Then one of them died unexpectedly of a heart attack at 53. It seemed very strange when the remaining two of us went to her wake and funeral without her...

[Jokerman]

5. The first girl I kissed passed away last year.

I hadn't seen her or heard anything about her in more than 20 years but for some reason the news of her death hit me hard.

It was particularly disturbing to find out that she died in shelter for the homeless.

[Miles Archer]

7. The first girl I kissed is now my Facebook friend, and we speak daily

She had to remind me that she was the first girl I kissed? How could I forget a thing like that? But according to her, we're talking first grade, second grade.

But some of the stories regarding other classmates have been pretty horrendous. I'm being as honest as I can when I can when I say that I look like an older version of me. If I were to look at a picture of me from the high school yearbook and a picture of me now, I'd say "Same guy, shorter hair, older."

But some of my classmates are virtually unrecognizable. They show up as "friends of friends" in Facebook and I look at the photo and then I look at the name and think "You've got to be KIDDING me."

[Jokerman]

8. Facebook can be a little strange at times.

I have at least one facebook friend that I still can't identify. Her profile says that she graduated from the same high school class but she posts under her married name and doesn't look at all familiar to me.

Another facebook friend was reminiscing about our days together in elementary school but I didn't even move into that district until Junior High.

There were over 300 people in my high school class and I left the town for good when I was 18. My yearbooks were lost in a fire so when someone says they remember me from school I usually just play along.

One exception was a friend request I got from a guy I did remember because we HATED each other in school. I ignored his request and a couple of weeks later he made the news when they found a meth lab in his house.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

6. Boy, do I ever hear you, my dear Miles Archer!

You are so very right.

I feel very lucky to have met and cared about WCGreen. He was a big part of my life for nearly 10 years, and now he's gone for good. He died in April after 16 months in the hospital.

We had some great times and great conversations and now those are done. Memories are all I have left. NO regrets here. And that's because we became close friends.

Your sentence here really gets to the truth of it: Life is going to come up on you one day like a freight train and that is not the time to have regrets about the things you didn't do and the

people you failed to love...including yourself.

[In_The_Wind]

9. For, it ends in the blink of an eye. Carpe Diem (Seize the day)!

[DFW]

10. Hasa diga mortality!!

My best friend while I was living in Spain as a teenager dropped dead of a hart attack at 38 while he was playing soccer in Madrid (he was from NH, but couldn't stay away from Spain). Later, a cousin died of brain cancer at 41, my brother-in-law died of glioblastoma at 54, and I was scheduled by Mother Nature to check out permanently on or about April 30, 2004.

I, at least, won at "Beat the Reaper (look up Beat The Reaper if it means nothing to you)." For how long, I have no idea. Like Bruce Hornsby sang, "maybe today, maybe tomorrow." Or maybe not for another 30 years. But I've been here, seizing days one at a time for the last 11 years--years I wasn't supposed to have at all. So, I've crammed another 50 year lifetime of doing stuff many people only dream about into the last 11 years. Why the hell not? If you have Mother Nature hot on your heels to cut out the shit and drop dead like she intended you to, it gives you a WHOLE other perspective on the time you have left, I promise you. I get asked when I'm going to slow down. My answer to that is that I was slated for slowing down to a full stop 11 years ago. Instead, I sneaked out the back door at the last minute and started running for the hills, and have been running for 11 years. Damned if I'm gonna slow down now. Mother Nature and the Reaper are still waiting.

Warren Zevon had a song "I'll sleep When I'm Dead," which, come to think of it, he now is. I'm not. It would seem I have a few diems left to be carping, and I intend to do just that. There is always time for that freight train the OP was talking about to run you over. Not yet, though, not yet.

[LiberalElite]

11. I Googled a childhood friend I hadn't seen in maybe 45-50 years and

found that she had died in her '50s of cancer maybe 10 years earlier.

Another younger friend died in her '40s of aggressive breast cancer.

[kwassa]

12. A wonderful girl I dated in high school died of anorexia in her twenties ..

the disease was just beginning to be defined, mostly after she died.

all her friends were completely baffled, including me.

then I went to college, and the girlfriend of a good friend wasted away with anorexia before our eyes. Fortunately, she survived.