After not sneezing for the first 9 or 10 days of the year, because I had the flu, I resumed my regular pace of about two sneezes per day. Or that’s the rate at which I think I sneeze. Hence this entry.
–––
January’s sneezes: 51 (1.6451 per day).
2020’s subtotal: 51 sneezes (1.6451/d).
–––
Here’s February’s result.
終
I love so many of the yearly roundups people post in Decembers – including, especially, the Jesus Christ! one annually posted by Steven Soderbergh. Mainly for my own curiosity (and memory) I decided to do one of my own – but monthly.
I think this is the complete list from January. But I started the month with a full-on flu, so the list, and its hopefully-chronological timeline, may not be 100% correct at the beginning. (If it’s off, it’s not off by much.)
A notable note is that this list absolutely does not include YouTube videos watched – or anything else from similar sites like Vimeo. It’s just a list of proper TV, miniseries, documentaries, and movies. The why of that is tradition more than anything. Baselessly, I still think of those as being more substantial art, even tho there are many YouTubers (and such) doing truly impressive work.
Anyway, here’s January’s.
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Dolemite Is My Name (TV)
Kevin Hart Don’t Fuck This Up (S1E1-6) (TV)
For All Mankind (S01E09 & 10) (TV)
The Morning Show (S01E09 & 10) (TV)
The Laundromat (TV)
Inside Bill’s Brain (Parts 1-3) (TV)
Molly’s Game (TV)
Ugly Delicious Does Breakfast Lunch & Dinner (S01E01-4) (TV)
GoodFellas (TV)
The Degenerates (S02E01-3) (TV) (iPad)
The Operative (iMac)
Unstoppable (iMac)
Inglourious Basterds (iMac)
The Mandalorian (S01E01-7) (iMac)
King of New York (iMac)
Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez (S01E01-3) (iPhone)
Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (theater)
The Devil Next Door (S01E01-5) (iPhone)
Don’t Fuck With Cats (S01E01) (iPhone)
–––
February’s is 27 days away….
–––
Update: Here’s February’s list.
終
I’m 43.
Somehow.
終
Tomorrow, here and in America, is my 43rd birthday. My first without my father. On clear, and cold, January nights, overhead in the sky, Orion sits prominently, drifting slowly westward – Earth’s attention wanders.
On a January night 43 years ago, after I and my mom were resting, my dad stepped outside into the frigid Nebraska air, his first time as a father, and looked up. Years earlier, around the same time, he was working late and looked up to see the very same Orion, and wondered what each star was called. He walked to his college’s library (perhaps late that Winter evening, or the following day) and looked them up.
Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Saiph, Meissa, Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka.
These are names I heard countless times in my childhood, around my birthday, always in the order in which he learned them, ending, at least, with the final three as listed here.
Now it’s January again, which happens around this time most years, but he’s gone. Orion’s still there – once his reminder of me; evermore, my reminder of him.
Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Saiph, Meissa, Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka.
終
I’ve worked at my current company for 7 years, 11 months. This New-Year break was my longest-ever, a full 8 days. The day before it started, I got the flu and effectively slept through the entire thing.
On the one hand, fuck 2019, of course this happened. On the other, I felt so fucking terrible, that the sadness I expected to experience didn’t actually happen. And that’s just about the best I could hope for.
–––
My dad’s favorite-ever employee, whom he hired and always, always spoke about with pride, sent me an e-mail last night to say that my father’s favorite colleague, effectively his best (work-)friend, died on December 20th. She said my dad would’ve seen humor in them both dying in the same year, and perhaps he would’ve. I’m not sure if my dad knew he was sick; I don’t recall him mentioning it to me. But it shocked me. He always seemed hale and hearty, big and full-of-life. I met him only a few times, but in my dad’s stories he overflowed with motion.
After my dad died, he was one of the few people I notified and he had nice comments. It was to him that I wrote a couple comments I think I included here as “I just sent an e-mail” excerpts.
I didn’t know he was sick. It’s sad. Fuck 2019.
終
Let’s change some shit for the better, this year.
終
It’s been a few days over two months. Time keeps on slippin’ (slippin’, slippin’) into the future. And, not a writer by habit, I'd forgotten to keep this blog alive.
I’ve been trying – sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, generally struggling – to slip back into the stream of life, get my feet below me, regain my balance, and move on. For the most part, it’s going about as expected: if I don’t think about the future, or the past, if I keep my eye (as it were) on the ball, getting thru the day isn’t entirely impossible anymore.
–––
My lifelong reaction to waking up has been to fight it, to try to extend my sleep until it becomes untenable. For the last couple months, nearly entirely, I’ve gotten out of bed shortly after I’ve woken up. Now, when I wake up, the thinking starts, forcing me out of bed – to get up, get showered, and fall into the distractions of life. The alternative is becoming overwhelmed with the deep, abiding sadness I'm subject to. But today, because of this cold, I managed a couple more hours of sleep and it felt truly good. But my bones started to hurt, I increasingly desperately needed to pee, and my clothes needed washing. I got up.
The last couple months have changed me.
–––
I’m sitting in a laundromat waiting for my clothes to finish washing so I can transfer them to a dryer, then take them back home, change, and, in time, head off to work for my, probably easy, three lessons. The caffeine I had a little while ago (from Lipton’s milk tea) has started to kick in, increasing my heart rate to a level about matched by normal people's. This is Day Three of my cold. I’m exhausted. I have work later, but no clean clothes, so I’m remedying that, at least, by being here. I'm seated on a bench, my backpack, and a bag containing a box of Kleenex and various cold-related implements, to my left. To my right is an unopened apple juice; behind it, a plastic bag containing the wrapper of a danish I just inhaled, an empty milk container, and some used Kleenex. (The bag is free if you want it.)
I have no energy. Hopefully the sugar-and-caffeine double-punch gives me just enough of a nudge to make it through the day. I should be okay.
–––
I've opened the apple juice.
I don't typically drink juice. Once, in a conversation with my paternal grandmother (now deceased), she obtusely talked about not knowing which foods are recommended for/to be avoided by diabetics. This was of course untrue, a way she rationalized eating ice-cream. But she asked if I could find and print lists of foods she, as a diabetic, should/shouldn't eat.
I did so. Orange juice and white bread topped the list. I stopped having either. Juice, being primarily suspended sugar (and little else) isn't something I've really had since then. Except when I have a cold. So yesterday I had some apple juice, and I'm doing so now.
It's delicious. But I’m tired.
–––
It’s been two months and three days.
終
A friend of mine asked how I’m doing. I replied: “The sensitive areas are still no-go, but I’m starting to locate a path between them.”
That’s about as well as I can phrase it. The pain remains, but, when I can ignore it, I can function, give or take. I’m still blending back into life, slowly where speed is manageable; unhappily where breathing is required.
終
It’s been more than a month.
–––
The pain is still real, but life seems to be plodding along. When I think back, or forward, little has changed. But the now is a little easier to live in.
–––
The less said about the Astros, the better….
–––
Two of the days I missed were classified as unexcused absences. I knew one would be, but the second merely blended in with all the days I missed. Then, halfway thru the meeting with my boss, I remembered why I’d missed that day.
They can’t have known that the day I missed was my father’s birthday, and that night was so bad, so low, so painful, that if I could have killed myself I would have. That it was the lowest I’ve ever been - so low that just returning to it in my mind brought extreme pain. They couldn’t have known this. But they also didn’t ask; they summarily determined my missing of work to have been so frivolous that I should be given a formal warning for it.
A moment of realization in the meeting brought it all back, in a quick but moist stream of pain so strong I asked (or he asked and I accepted) to end the meeting. Adding a punishment to that day, retroactively making it even worse than it had been at the time, was an almost delicious insult.
They couldn’t’ve known. But they could’ve asked.
–––
I’ve stopped counting the days, but it’s over a month (it’s Halloween) and I dunno how to process that. I still cannot process that.
終
Day 28
———
It’s been a couple days since the last update. Today was Monday, which I didn’t think about until just now: it’s been four weeks.
On Friday, which was Day 25, and the next day, the day of my last update, the nights were hard. Saturday night was a regression. I absolutely couldn’t sleep. At all. Partially because of all the caffeine I drank to make it thru the day; partially, the pain.
I had to wake up at about 8am on Sunday. (Actually, I realized sometime mid-afternoon that my first lesson started 45 minutes later than I remembered, so I didn’t have to wake up until about 8:45, but that barely changes the math.) At about 5:45, when it was clear that sleep wouldn’t come, I realized I could just call in sick. I felt guilty about that (I feel guilty about it when I’m actually sick), but after maybe 20 more minutes, I realized that I didn’t have much of a choice. I’d either work on about an hour of sleep, at best, or I’d skip it and try again the next day.
I tried to make it Sunday,
but I got so damned depressed,
that I set my sights on Monday,
and I got myself undressed.
—America, Sister Golden Hair
———
My parents divorced when I was little, and never really spoke about each other. Their relationship wasn’t off-limits, but the conversations never really happened. There’d be the occasional comment or data point dropped into other conversations, but they avoided talking about it and I avoided asking.
Even fewer, were the happy-times anecdotes, but that song was one of them. One night, my parents, just dating then, were out at a bar or a nightclub or something. (They met and married in a small midwestern town, so it was likely just a bar; regardless, the place had a DJ and the ability to make requests.) Between songs, as my parents enjoyed their night, an incredibly drunk woman (this was the late-’70s) yelled, “Play Sister Golden Sister Hair!”
———
Sunday didn’t end up so bad. It was started (again, after very little sleep) by Game 6 of the ALCS — its final game. The Astros held a 4-2 lead for most of the game but left baserunners on base in far too many innings, remaining seemingly a base-hit away from breaking the game wide open, but never getting there — or a bad pitch away from losing it. The Yankees hung on, down just two runs, and, in the top of the 9th, because this is how baseball works, tied it on a devastating, crowd-silencing home run.
The Astros started the bottom of the 9th with back-to-back strikeouts. Not a good sign. George Springer then walked. Jose Altuve worked his at-bat to a 2-1 count. Then hit a high slider extremely hard… over the wall to left center.
Home run. Walk-off. Penant.
I looked at my iMac for a moment absolutely incapable of understanding that what I just saw happen really just happened. And, dumb as this may sound, it substantially altered my emotions. I got up and showered, smiling over the holy-shit-baseball!-ness of it all: an all-time ALCS moment by the Yankees, an at-bat we’ll be talking about in a generation, being nearly immediately wiped away by an even bigger one by the Astros, altering not just future baseball history, but rewriting the home run that happened just 5 batters prior.
I also managed to talk a bit with a friend on Sunday, the first actual, adult conversation I’ve had in over a month. And to drink a pretty-fantastic bubble tea, too. I moved around a bit, as well, including a long walk to a home store while listening to some funny podcasts. Each of these helped, and made the day remarkably better than Friday night or Saturday had been.
———
It’s Day 28. Four weeks since he died; four weeks of this. Yet there are moments of light. The lightness brings its own pain, and guilt, and it’s difficult to look at because my eyes are also sensitive, but it’s there. And that’s new.
終
Day 26
–––
As I said, the day started hard; included a carryover funk; the Astros lost; I did a small amount of in-Starbucks work and ate a root-veggie wrap.
–––
I returned home after the Starbucks, after wandering a little, kinda aimlessly. Listened to some ancient tech podcasts I’ve been working thru for a few years whenever I catch up on current podcasts. Because of this, I again looked into using Pinboard and again decided it doesn't serve a need I have; I just don’t think I use the Internets the way its users do. But I did look at its “popular” page and read several articles from it.
–––
At home, I forced myself to take a nap. For the first half-hour, I woke up every 10 minutes, but I did manage to sleep about one hour, all told. I’m still awfully tired.
I also walked to a local store afterward, and bought a few small things to eat. And now I’m sitting in a nearby laundromat, washing clothes, doing this, waiting for work to appear (spoiler: it won’t). Later, I may walk back to Starbucks and do something else productive.
Gotta be up early for work tomorrow.
–––
Day 26. A lack of progress after yesterday’s reversion.
終
Day 25
–––
Work was busy for the first time, and I survived. I finished with two of my favorite-ever students and everyone who came before was fine or better – including one I last saw 5.5 years ago, which I only realized when I didn’t recognize him at all and rechecked the date of our prior lesson. I did a little in-Starbucks work in the early evening, before heading home in advance of the approaching rain. The night was contemplative and hard. And that carried over to this morning.
–––
The Astros won yesterday, during my first block of lessons, which helped the day start more brightly. And this morning they lost, which didn’t. (ALCS Games 4 and 5, respectively.)
–––
Whatever else I meant to note or had to say has faded next to the returning funk. I don’t have much gas today, or hope. I got out of the house to correct yet more English in Starbucks, but there’s not much to correct. My blistering pace earlier this month, has slowed to near stillness in the last few days, but not for lack of trying.
–––
Managed to finish season 2 of Succession, which, tho great, took more focusing effort than I would’ve liked. The things which used to be easier – escapism, in this case – no longer are.
–––
Slept very little two nights ago, because work on Day 25 started early. And last night (it’s midday of Day 26 as I write this) was shortened for the early start to the game this morning. Last night, sending text messages to friends, I actually just fell asleep. I woke up after about 10 minutes surprised. I stayed up because I needed to shower and take out garbage. (Actually, I think I showered….) The buildup of poor or shortened nights and long walks (altho last night’s walk was about normal) has required me to effectively survive on (milk-tea) caffeine. I’m just constantly exhausted. I need more sleep, but lying down really sucks emotionally.
–––
I appear to be eating a little more. I’m not exactly sure I have an appetite, but I do think about getting food, which I guess is what an appetite is. Foods don’t sound good, and I’m still not eating large amounts (not necessarily a bad thing), but I have been eating. Last night I bought a triangle sandwich at Starbucks; just now I had a root-vegetable wrap. (I forwent a drink in both cases.)
Consequently, I did still lose .1kg yesterday. Yesterday was a long day but I didn’t walk a lot, or at speed, so I’m only vaguely surprised the loss was so small. But down is better than otherwise so I’ll take it. Yet again: this is the only benefit of this experience.
My clothes are starting to hang ridiculously on me….
–––
It was Day 25, which saw a mental regression but began okay-enough.
終
Day 24
–––
Game 4 of the ALCS was postponed for rain until tomorrow, so today I tried to get some actual sleep – or that’s what I told myself when I awoke early again, rolled over, and defiantly tried to sleep some more. I managed maybe 6 hours of unquality sleep and then just lay in bed for more than two additional hours, having neither the gas nor the desire to actually get the fuck up and live my day.
I worked late, but I did manage to actually get up before I absolutely needed to and walk to a local pharmacy to get some (off-brand-but-sufficient) Q-tips. Then I wandered home and got ready to go to work, where I was not at all busy. Which is okay, tho - tomorrow I’ll get hammered with lessons, so I appreciated the relaxed day.
–––
While walking to the pharmacy, I was thinking about things my father liked. I have a growing text file of anecdotes and jokes and memories of him. But it also has, or now maybe primarily has, a list of things he used to love. I don’t know what sparked it, but I remembered a few moments from my childhood and these brought with them a number of things I quickly added to my list.
My teeth have never been great. When I was a kid I needed a number of dental surgeries (and then 5.5 years of braces). As my parents were divorced, my dad would always take me to the appointments and, afterward, as my mouth was filled with numbness and I would relax on our couch, my dad would bake bags of frozen French fries and we would watch comedies together. Things like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (where he’d explain the cameos) and Rustlers' Rhapsody. At this remove, I can’t recall much of the former, but the latter was one of the first movies that we watched together and just howled from laughter. I haven’t seen it in decades, so I’m not sure if it’s actually funny, but the memories of watching it are heartwarming – and, now, mine alone.
But the big one, which for some reasons had evaded me until this morning, is Jerry Lewis. Together, we must’ve watched The Errand Boy and The Bellboy and The Patsy and The Disorderly Orderly and Cinderfella an unreasonable number of times. He adored those movies and so did I.
––––
He always loved to laugh and he loved comedies – years later we’d watch movies like Silver Streak and Blazing Saddles and listen to the comedy albums by Bill Cosby, Steve Martin, George Carlin, Nichols and May, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers; Spike Jones’ and Tom Lehrer’s ridiculous songs; etc. His laugh was big and contagious and one of life’s great sounds.
Making him laugh was easy. Making him really laugh, truly guffaw, was less easy and always a highlight for me. I didn’t manage it enough times, but when I did it felt like I was giving him something back. It felt good; I felt less useless. As I wrote the paragraphs above, I thought of a running joke between him and I that hit me like a gut-punch and brought tears to my eyes.
We sat in the waiting room of a doctor’s office when I was a small kid. Across the mostly empty, somewhat small room was a lady whose face rested in pursed lips and a fiercely furrowed brow – whether she was in fact, I cannot recall, but she looked absolutely furious. My dad was reading a magazine or something as we waited forever to see the doctor. I nudged him and mimicked the woman. Having not seen her, her looked at me confused for a moment then scanned the room – and immediately he started to laugh. I was maybe 7 years old. I’m 42 now and when he died. We’d make this facial expression to each other occasionally over the 35 intervening years and it would always, always make us laugh. As dumb as it was, it was ours; a memory I’ll cherish. I’m surprised I only just thought of it.
–––
It’s been 24 days and I wanna hear him laugh again. Make him laugh again.
終
Days 22 and 23
–––
As I sit to write updates I find that I’m having actual difficulty separating yesterday (Day 22) from today (23). I can remember a few things so I’ll list these in general order, but just combine the days here because I don’t have the wherewithal to tease them apart.
–––
I think I mentioned weeks ago that I haven’t been taking any medicine because it feels like cheating my emotions. That’s not quite the right way to explain it, but I'm unsure of a better way. Anyway, yesterday (Day 21), I look a Xanax before my early-morning work to mitigate the anxiety-boost from the caffeine I took to wake up, and to calm my discomfort more generally.
This made me tired enough to cause the longer-than-expected nap I took after work. That night, I took another one, but I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just to get something like sleep after the nap; I’m not sure. Regardless, it made waking up incredibly difficult. I only worked in the evening, so it wasn’t critical. But for the first time since he died, I had a hard time waking up.
I couldn’t wake up, but I also slept like shit. I finally forced myself out of bed at sometime around 2:30, showered, and struggled to get ready for work. Whatever resistance to Xanax I’d built up in the last couple years seems to have been entirely reset in the last, give-or-take, 24 days of taking nothing at all (plus, the extremely small amount of sleep I’ve had in over 3 weeks). It hammered me.
I felt off all Day 22 and had to drink an inordinate amount of caffeine just to feel like I could function. This caused a repeat of the problem because, this morning (Day 23), the Astros and Yankees played at 5 fucking am. In an attempt to sleep early enough last night to wake up for the game this morning, I took yet another Xanax. I fell asleep at about 2:30am, far earlier than I have been falling asleep recently. I set my alarm for around 5:30, late enough to miss all the pre-game shit and ensure that the game would be going when I tuned in.
I woke up and checked my phone to find not a single notification from the notification-happy MLB app. In my extremely-tired, half-asleep state, I figured that I must’ve confused the days and fell back asleep. About 40 minutes later, perhaps an hour, I woke up and checked my phone again. There were a couple notifications about the then-upcoming 4th game of the Cards-Nats NLCS, but nothing about the Game 3 of the Astros-Yankees ALC.
I woke up later when a friend sent me a message saying the Nats were about to sweep the Cards. I checked my notifications and there was still no other notifications. So I opened the app – something I should’ve done hours earlier – and found that the Nats were up 7-1, just a couple innings away from moving on to the World Series. And, of course, I saw the final score of the ALCS’s Game 3: Astros over the Yankees 4-1.
I’m happy the Astros won, but god dammit….
Because I’d taken the Xanax the night before, I fell back to sleep after discovering this disappointment, and didn’t actually roll out of bed until around 3:30. I’ve swung, with the unwise aid of medicines, from sleeping almost not at all, to sleeping way too long while getting sleep that feels just as shitty.
Tonight I’ll return to not taking anything and try to see if I can sleep normally or if, as I suspect, my sleep is just broken for a while.
–––
Last night (22) at work, I had four lessons and I made it through well enough. Tonight (23), I had the same number of lessons, but all the people were fun so I was able to almost enjoy myself. This was actually surprising, because I don’t feel in any way happy. And yet the lessons weren’t so bad. My first student easily laughs at my jokes when we (rarely) have lessons and tonight I was once again having fun making her laugh.
–––
These two experiences are new, but they don’t feel like things have changed. Perhaps, looking back, this will mark a turning point. Or perhaps this experience just continues it’s nothing-is-ever-the-same style. I’m unsure.
I’m unsure of anything at all.
–––
After listening to a song I randomly remembered, I tweeted: “When I’m all emotional, I find music really hard to listen to and always have. Can’t say precisely why, but the emotion just kinda amplify when music is introduced. [….] Just listened to a song I haven’t heard in years. Spend the entire time on the verge of waterworks. And it’s not even really a nostalgic song for me.”
I experience music emotionally, but my brain also does something that may or may not be unique: it embeds the emotions I was feeling when a song played (over and over on the radio or by me), rendering many, many songs almost unplayable later because they carry the weight of whatever I was feeling at the time, where I was, the person I was, what was going on around me, etc. (My favorite example is Night Ranger’s song Sister Christian. It was released and popular around the time my parents separated and divorced. Because of this, I couldn’t listen to it for about the following 13 or 14 years, so strongly was it linked to that fragile time of my childhood – until, that is, it popped up in a Boogie Nights scene that was so great and intense that it kind of overrode the fading memories of my childhood.)
For fear of staining whatever music I might be listening to during this awful time, I’ve pretty much avoided any. I did listen to Big Thief’s new album a couple times, but stopped because I do want to listen to it in the future. And I worry that beginning to now will make it painful to hear, even years from now. And so I continue to listen to podcasts. And when they finish, I wait for more to come and walk in silence.
–––
I’ve managed, in halves, to make it through two more episodes of Succession. It’s a fantastic show and I really want to get through the season, but focusing on something, anything, takes effort I don’t have, and sometimes causes pain I’d like to avoid. I assume this will be the case for a while. So the list of movies and TV shows I want to see will continue to pile up unwatched.
–––
It’s been two more days. And I still feel like I’ve lived a lot longer than 23 days.
終
It’s been three weeks. Today is Day 21.
–––
Yesterday wasn’t fun and has already begun to blur. I had to work, so I could’t watch the Astros second ALCS game against the Yankees. During my break, I walked to a nearby store for some more (yet more) milktea and used the pitch-tracker on the MLB app to ‘watch’ a bit of the game’s extra innings. I found what I wanted to buy and set my phone down as Carlos Correa was batting. Seconds later he hit a walk-off homerun. I threw my arms up and the cashier looked at me, down at my phone, then laughed.
I returned home after work and managed to fall asleep for what I thought would be 15-30 minutes – hopeful considering how little sleep I’ve been getting. About 70 minutes later I woke up. That was a first in a long, long time.
–––
Later in the day some stuff happened that I can’t piece together now. None of it was particular interesting.
–––
In the evening I took another walk to Starbucks (where I’m typing this after work the following day). After staying until just before closing at 2am, I took a long, twisting walk home. >6km. I was up late after, not actually getting to sleep until well after 7am.
–––
Compared with my recent existence, it wasn’t an entirely terrible day. During one of my early lessons, I made myself laugh, altho I can’t remember why (I almost never remember my own jokes). And on the way home from work I stopped at a coffee shop and did something so absent-mindedly dumb that I had my first proper, full-throated laugh in over a month. It wasn’t entirely awful.
–––
It’s been just 3 weeks and a lifetime all at once.
終
Day 20. Already 20.
–––
I’ve had more caffeine and less sleep in the last >three weeks than at another other time in my life. (It’s possible I’ve had more caffeine than I did this year up until this streak). I feel so god damned bizarre – wired, but also so absolutely, fundamentally, entirely exhausted.
I keep feeling earthquakes that are my own – either the caffeine kicking in or my body shutting off. And they keep catching me off guard. “Quake? ... Oh.”
I just wanna sleep until November. Of 2037. But I can’t sleep. Because laying down brings pain and so I have to get up, to move around, to fight it off, and, many times, to escape.
–––
I dunno if I mentioned this in my prior 87 updates, but I have a cousin who has nearly the same name as my father. Both of them were named after my great uncle, who died in France two weeks after his 21st birthday (less than half my current age) and about 5 months before VE Day.
A few days after my dad died, I got a facebook friendnrequest from that cousin. Which, for the millisecond before I understood what was happening, was absolutely chilling. The dead just don’t send friend requests.
I accepted the request, but muted (or unfollowed, or however Facebook designates this action) him so I don’t keep having the mini heart attacks seeing his name keeps causing.
This is something I never fucking predicted. Maybe we should stop naming people after other people.
–––
As I did say elseplace, I keep having momentary thoughts that I should show something to my dad or ask him questions, only to immediately be hit again by the understanding that he’s gone, and not coming back. And this has made me think again about another sad aspect of death.
When someone retires or is fired after working someplace for a long time, more than just their presence is lost. Their portion of the institution’s knowledge and memory goes with them. Think about how much NASA lost after the people who worked on Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo started retiring and dying. (Wanna make a new Saturn V? Enjoy starting from scratch.)
Some of this loss can be mitigated via training and, in the case of retirement, a phone call. But the rest of it goes with the worker. This is part of what makes Rex Tillerson’s eviceration of the State Department so painful. All those career diplomats, all that understanding and expertise, were just shown the door in a way so spite-filled and shitty that most of them will never return, even if they are ever financially able to do so.
Which brings me back to family: the tragedy of such a loss as mine, is the amount of information that disappeared with my father. He was, in a way, a keeper of family history. If curious, I could ask him about family members, or dates, or other family history (especially the history that preceded me) and his recall was deep and comprehensive.
Malcolm Gladwell spoke about transitive memories, in one of his book. The idea is we don’t tend to learn things that someone nearby knows. If we need the information, we can just ask them – as if their brain is an offshoot of our own. This system, if it actually exists, has one critical flaw: if only one person keeps some information, that egg is in a single basket. If they go away, so does it. And everything else they take with them.
I’ve already had a couple questions the answers of which will remain forever lost because he is gone.
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It’s been 20 days.
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