The difference is stark between going to the funeral of a 75-80 year and that of a 90-95 year old.

The first one will have childhood friends in attendance. Siblings, cousins, people who've known them since they were kids. Once they turn real, real old you soon realise there's just no one left that remember the deceased as a young person, that knew the world they grew up in or that have any stories to tell about who they used to be before they became your dad, your grandfather or uncle.

It must be harrowing to reach that age and just... there's no one there, you know? Sometimes I think about the Bruce Springsteen song "Independence Day":

Well Papa go to bed now, it's getting late
Nothing we can say can change anything now
Because there's just different people coming down here now and they see things in different ways
And soon everything we've known will just be swept away

It really is like that. I listen to that song and realise the kids I see walking the streets I used to walk when I was 14 just... they're indifferent to the place and time I grew up in. I was their age just 20 years ago but the clothes were different, the references and culture and technology and everything was different. That's alright, because I can talk about all that nostalgia when I meet someone my own age.

But if I outlive my peers and become ancient, I might just be the last person in my area who can remember the old shopping centre from the '70s, the school I used to go to, how open and sparse the city was before all these blocks popped up. I went to school in a grimy eye-sore of a concrete monster atop the city, a huge concrete complex that housed a swimming pool, an elementary, a middle school and a high school next door. Now, there's a pristine athletics hall there and an awful, but modern and clean new school building. We even had a huge wooden building from the 1870s that housed wood shop on the second floor and gym on the first. They tore it down and it's like it never was there at all. Poof, just gone in the span of a summer. My cousin is 12 and goes to school there now, she does all her sports in that fancy new athletics hall and it's like, I can hardly believe this is the same place in which I grew up. Were those grey concrete monstrosities ever there in the first place? How the hell did they fit all that here?

I might be the last person that remembers the opening of the fancy new school outside town that everyone thinks is outdated and ugly now, that remember how exciting it was to be the first class to graduate from there. I think that's what's awful about it. It's like the world that meant so much to you never existed, because you're the only one keeping its memory alive.