Still Fairly Unbearable
Day 20. Already 20.
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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.
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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.
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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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