Friday Notes Series

Friday Notes #76 — Flirting With The End of Life

Expressing emotions about the sunset of life.

JF Martin

JF Martin

— 2 min read
Friday Notes #76 — Flirting With The End of Life
A scene from the cemetery behind a church on the seashore – a really nice place to spend some time

Sitting in front of my M1 MacBook Air, using Craft as my typewriter machine, I think about the past week. That one was hard on me.

Last weekend, I visited my mother, living some 600 KM away from Montreal, Canada. The last time I saw her was in August 2021, for my father's funeral, who died in March of that year (See Friday Notes #36). What a difference nine months made on my 87 years old mother. She's living with Parkinson's disease for a few years; she shows signs of a complete lack of autonomy. I feel very sad to see her getting old and incapable this way. On the other hand, I know she is in much better shape mentally; she can't talk a lot: barely a few words at once, on her good days. It's highly frustrating for her. She's a prisoner of her body. Moreover, her kidneys are barely working. In sum, she is more and more flirting with the end of her existence.

A few kilometres away from my mom’s residence, there is a church close to the seashore with an old cemetery behind, forming a unique architectural environment. I went to spend some time there, just in time to see the sunset. It was a great experience and a visual reminder about how my mother is actually on her sunset. I took many pictures, trying to capture the scene and a bit of my mood at the moment. With sadness, I was reminded that our time here on earth isn’t eternal and that we should care for ourselves and others whenever possible. Getting old isn’t always funny. After a few moments spent walking around the cemetery, the sun vanishing behind the horizon, I left the place, and went back to my hotel, thinking about the next day, when I’ll return to visit my mother and spend some time with her. Maybe for the last time.

The sunset as seen from the cemetery

Please look at another variant of this picture on my Glass profile. The header picture is from me too.

💡
What did I learn this week? During a visit to OVHCloud's biggest data center in Canada, I learned that by using water-cooling systems instead of traditional AC to cool the data center, OVHCloud uses less energy and can sell its services at much lower prices than AWS or Azure. Over the years, OVHCloud upgraded its water cooling technologies. Each part of their data center uses a different version of water cooling systems, the more recent being much more effective than previous generations. Pretty cool stuff. Too bad I couldn't take any pictures.

Read more