The passing of friends....

Within the last few weeks I've found out three friends have died, from three seperate chapters of my life. The one I just heard about actually died in March....and I didn't kbow until today after hearing from her son-in-law. Her name is Joanne Quarz and for the last few decades she's lived in Las Vegas. Back in the day, when I was an Allstate Agent, she was one of my business partners when we formed a partnership .... Joanne, myself, and Marcia Spakoski opened and operated a Neighborhood Office on the Thames River in Groton CT. We were partners for several years, until I decided to go on my own and opened an office (with my wife Alice) on Broad Street in New London. Both Marcia and Joanne stayed together until their eventual retirement. Another friend who passed, who I only found out about from a note of a mutual fiiend, was John Martins. Our friendship goes back to the early Lions Club days...and possibly Jaycee's?. John, on his retirement moved to South Florida which is where he died. There was no local (CT) obituary that I could find and I wouldn't have known except for Bill Long's kind note to me. The last one, and this is recent in the last few days, was on my friend John Silong. John is a Florida friend from the old Space Coast Sams Good Sams Chapter we both belonged to. The Good Sam Chapter was another chapter in my own life, and I feel I'm losing people from early and late chapters of my own. Funerals, and that opportunity to reminice with old friends and toast the dearly departed, seem to have gone away...leaving uncomfortable voids in our sence of well being.