ends of an era

 Tonight was the retirement dinner for my current chair. Tomorrow is her last day; Friday she is traveling to Vegas with her sister. 

The gift went over well; she said her dog would love it, and that the balls float is good because they go stay at a cabin with a lake (and the dog being a Golden retriever, I could see her wanting to chase balls into the water)

It's going to be weird, though, being the person with the longest seniority once she's gone. I commented I didn't feel mature enough to be the person with longest seniority (And no one contradicted me; chat, should I be offended?)

I have one colleague who came a couple years after me, but after that, everyone else is more recent (Our anatomist is actually older than I am but he came later than I did; but he noted tonight he could retire in 2 years - we are on "rule of 90," where your age and years of experience have to add up to 90 [possibly unless you're 65? I'm not sure about that]. I could retire in four years.)

But another end of an era - this morning we got an e-mail that the man who had been the department chair in 1999 when I started here had died. He's the one who extended the job offer to me and one of the people who interviewed me for the position. He was the person who started "Friday pie-day" when people would bring in pie, which gradually grew into monthly potluck lunches (which kind of died out during the pandemic)

So I don't know. After he retired in 2001 I would very occasionally run into him at the grocery store, and he'd ask about the department.  

He was probably close to 90, at my estimate, so he had a good long life, but still - it's kind of sad to me, another bit of my past days gone.

 (I looked up his obituary - he was 86. And he served in Vietnam, something I had not known.)

They had a nice photo of him up on the obituary site; it was a photo where he looked like I remembered him (so probably a slightly older photo). He was a nice man and did well as our department chair. 

One of the things that's hard to get used to as an older adult is how many people you have known wind up dying, sometimes in fairly rapid succession.