That's how I'm feeling this morning. Still kind of tired, wishing it was Friday and not Thursday, wishing I had some fun plan for the weekend. But there are other things:
Last night, in our FaceTime conversation, my mom told me that someone who had been a good friend of my dad's had died. W. was a fellow geologist and a career Army officer (I think he had moved to the Reserves at the time we knew him). I was never....particularly...taken with him because to me he came off as a bit more brusque than what I like (but then, that might have been his background) but I know he and my dad were good friends.
I'm sad in the sense that that's another connection to my dad gone. But also sad because my mom mentioned that W.'s widow noted that when she told him my dad had died, he started to cry - it still surprises me when men of a certain age cry, because to me it signals "This is a very big and serious deal." I guess kind of like how I react when certain women get really angry - I grew up with very traditional gender roles, and unexpected emotional releases seem more serious to me.
Also, I think of what my friend Wanda told me back in 2016, when my cousin Chum died after having a massive stroke (he and his brother Tom, who predeceased him, were 20 or more years older than I am). She said when you mourn a person, you are partly mourning that person, but also mourning the fact that the experiences you had with them are really never going to happen again. And yes, it would have been unlikely I would have hung out with Chum and his family again after my grandmother died, and especially after my aunt (his mother) died - we didn't travel there to visit people any more. But I do remember the times when we all were younger, and my family would go up to visit my grandmother in the summer (partly to see her but partly to escape the more-oppressive late-summer heat in Ohio for the cooler region of northern Michigan). A big thing in that tiny town was visiting - so people would eat a light early breakfast, and then around 9 or 10 am, people would start to show up and my grandmother's house. She'd make coffee (maybe a few people drank tea? But it would have been the plain old Lipton teabags....) and set out whatever cake or pie was leftover from the previous day, or make toast, or whatever, and people would sit around at talk. Or sometimes they'd come a bit later, at lunchtime, and she'd put out cold meat and cheese and lettuce and stuff and people would make sandwiches and talk and eat (and have coffee; coffee was a constant. My family wasn't of Scandinavian origin though they did adopt some of the Scandinavian-filtered northern Michigan customs)
I think W.'s passing reminded me of the couple of college-workshop trips we all took - my dad paid my way provided I helped carry gear and, at the times when we stayed at a facility where we had to cook, do some of the cooking. There are a couple of military R and R facilities (well, one might have been a Parks research facility?) within Volcanoes National Park, and W. was able to get us lodging in them because of his credentials - and so I remember those trips, and how I will never again have that level of freedom from responsibility (where someone else was in charge and, like I said, I just had to help out with chores but otherwise could enjoy myself) and opportunity to just learn...
But also, it makes me wonder - because women in my mom's family tend to be remarkably long-lived - will there be anyone left to cry for me when I die? I mean, it shouldn't matter, but for some reason it does, to me.
***
Also, this crossed my twitter stream, a repost from the author of the book it's from (Johann Hari, "Lost Connections"):
And it strikes me: how many people in the pandemic are experiencing several of those? I know #1 was BIG for me this spring and summer - being off campus, only interacting with students through a screen (and then this summer, doing what felt like nothing - reading and trying to figure out "distanced" labs) and that was terrible and I know it made me sad and anxious). I'm also disconnected from other people - though less now than over the summer, and I do think being back in my building (even with reduced/distanced classes, and a few of my colleagues teaching entirely remotely, so I never see them) and also having church back in-person, if in a very different form, helps. Not sure about 7; I find a lot of my faith in the future and faith in....things getting better because "people are fundamentally good" has been shaken to its core. And perhaps disconnection from status and respect: not having people giving positive feedback for anything I was doing really got to me.
And yeah, yeah: I know other people have it a lot worse than I do. But that doesn't mean I'm finding it easy.
I expect if the viral pandemic ever ends (or ever has enough improvement that we're 90% back to normal again) there will be a second-wave pandemic of people having a hard time functioning. I know all through this I've gotten angry periodically at everything and swore that I would just quit my job, or that if I could take early retirement, I would - but then, the being cut off from meaningful work would kill me. (Yes, volunteer work - but during the unchecked spread of a virus, that's not so possible as it once was). I think this will fundamentally change our culture, and not in a good way. (In myself, a big thing I see is a giant recrudescence of mistrust of my fellow human - based on how peers treated me as a kid, I didn't trust people to help me or to even show me basic human kindness. I was starting to get over that and now...well, the video of people screaming at grocery store employees over masks and the like, even if that is 0.005% of the population, it makes me want to go "nope, humanity's spoiled, throw it out" and walk away)
So I don't know. I do know I very much wish it were possible to hug people again, and to travel to see my mom without worry about me being exposed and maybe exposing her. Or even just simple things like eating a mean IN a restaurant (and not on a patio, or not food I pick up and carry home with me)
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