There is a strange weight that comes with hearing that someone has passed away. It can stop you in your tracks, even when it is someone you have not spoken to in years. A name appears, and suddenly memories come rushing back. You remember a face, a laugh, a place you used to be together, or a version of yourself from another time.

Sometimes it is even more specific than a memory. You can hear their voice.

You hear that an old teammate has passed away, and suddenly you can hear him yell, “Hey Iceman,” in that exact way he used to. Not just the words, but the exact tone of it. The way he shouted it across the room or how it was said when he was giving you a hard time about something. You may not have heard that voice in years, but somehow it is still stored perfectly in your head.

The same thing can happen with a teacher, a neighbor, the lunch lady, or someone who owned a business in town. You remember how they sounded or some little movement that was uniquely theirs. The way they walked, tilted their head when they listened, or shook their head when they laughed. It may have been something you barely noticed while they were alive, yet somehow your mind kept it. You hear they are gone, and for a moment they are right there with you again.

As I get older, that feeling seems to come more often. There was a time when the news was usually that a friend had lost a grandparent. Then it became a friend losing a parent. Eventually, the names started getting closer. Classmates, old friends, teammates, neighbors, teachers, co-workers, and familiar faces from around town became the people we were hearing about.

Some of them may not have been close friends, but they were part of the scenery of our lives. They were simply there. We saw them at school, at the ball field, at church, downtown, at the grocery store, or around the neighborhood. We never gave much thought to a time when they would not be there.

Then one day they are not.

Time feels different as we get older. There are days that seem to drag, yet somehow the birthdays keep coming, the summers keep ending, and Christmas keeps arriving. Five years somehow becomes ten.

The days can move slowly, but the years move incredibly fast.

When we were young, a year seemed enormous. Summer vacation felt like it lasted forever. Waiting for Christmas seemed endless. Turning sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-one felt like it would never arrive. Maybe part of the reason is simply the yardstick we use to measure our lives. When you are ten years old, one year is one-tenth of your entire life. By the time you are sixty, a year is only one-sixtieth. On the yardstick of a lifetime, each passing year simply takes up a little less space.

We get busy along the way. We move away, change jobs, raise families, make new friends, and sometimes lose touch with old ones. We tell ourselves we will call someone later or catch up the next time we are back in town. We assume there will be another reunion, another ball game, another dinner, or another afternoon sitting around telling the same old stories. Most of the time there is, until suddenly there is not.

That is when the old saying “life is too short” starts to mean something different. When you are young, it can sound like just another phrase people say. But as the years pass and the people we hear have passed away move from grandparents to parents and eventually to people our own age, those words begin to carry a lot more weight.

There is another side to growing older that I think about too. If you are fortunate enough to live a long life, you may also live long enough to watch much of your generation disappear. The people who knew your parents, remembered the old neighborhood, went to school with you, knew the same teachers, and remembered the same places slowly become fewer.

There must be a particular loneliness in being one of the people still here. You can mention something that happened when you were seventeen and realize there are fewer people left who remember it. The ones who are gone knew the story without needing the background. They were standing there when it happened.

At some point, some memories become yours alone.

And then there is the thought that becomes harder to ignore with every passing year.

One day, it will be me.

One day someone will hear my name and realize that I am gone. Maybe for a moment they will hear my voice in their head. Maybe an old teammate will remember calling me “Iceman” exactly the way it sounded all those years ago. Someone else may remember the way I laughed, something I always said, a ball game, a concert, or some completely ordinary afternoon that neither of us realized at the time would someday become a memory.

Maybe they will come across an old photograph and smile. Maybe they will remember something about me that I never even knew mattered to them.

I do not think about that in a morbid way. I think about it as perspective. None of us know how much time we have left, yet we spend a lot of our lives assuming there will always be more time. Time enough to say something we should have said years ago.

So, when I hear that a familiar name is gone, I grieve for that person and the people who loved them. But I also feel another small piece of the world I once knew slipping into memory.

The strange thing is that those people never completely disappear. Years later, something as simple as hearing their name can bring back their face, their laugh, a gesture, or the sound of their voice as clearly as if you had heard it yesterday.

The days may sometimes seem long, but the years are moving fast. Someday, all any of us will leave behind are the memories we gave to other people. I hope mine are the kind that people still smile about years later.