I'm working on the last two samples from the second site. I should get them done today (the first one is prepping; you have to wet down the soil to hunt through it and I'm finding the soil from under the cedars - like this one - take longer, I presume it's resins from the leaf litter being hydrophobic)
I might not come in tomorrow. For one thing, I feel like it's good to take a little break between long bouts of working and "between sites" seems like a good point to do that. But there's also a lunch I need to go to tomorrow at 11:15, and I don't want to risk getting grubby before it.
One of the members of my AAUW group is moving to Little Rock. I presume it is so she and her husband can be closer to children; she is about the same age as my mom and her husband has to be close to her in age. She's had a few health issues (mostly heart related) over the past year or so, so I get it, I do.
But I don't like that she's leaving.
I didn't see her all THAT often but thought of her as a friend. She's an interesting person - first, she worked as an ICU and I think, oncology nurse, and then later on got ordained and served as a minister for a number of years.
And she gave me a few pieces of wisdom over the years, one of which has been very important and which I shared with other people (and another friend of mine, in particular, told me she found it very helpful and "the thing I needed to hear right at this time")
The wisdom was: "when someone you love passes on, you are not just mourning the person, you are mourning the good times you had with that person and realizing you'll never have them again"
And yeah. I feel that. And not even with people who die - when people move away or grow apart from you or whatever and things aren't the same and in some cases the friendship doesn't last, you mourn the times you had that you'll never have again.
The context for her telling me this was back in 2016. I had two cousins - the sons of my mom's oldest sister. They were considerably older than I was (by at least 20 years; I think Chum was born in the early 1940s, so he was closer to 30 years older). They both served in Vietnam. Tom, the younger of the two, apparently saw some very bad stuff - he suffered from depression much of the rest of his life, I guess, and wound up dying by suicide in the early 2000s. Chum seemed to have suffered more physical problems - he was probably exposed to Agent Orange, and also something happened that really wrecked up his back; as an adult he was stooped and sometimes walked with difficulty.
I liked Chum even though he was much older (and in fact, had kids not too much younger than me). He was a good talker, he was good to his mother (my aunt) and to our grandmother - in fact, he was probably one of the main people who made it so my grandmother could stay in her own house up to the last six months or so of her life. He used to come over almost every day when we were up there visiting Grandma to "visit" (hang out and drink coffee and talk, which was sort of the main thing to do in the little town where our grandma lived). He also fished and sometimes brought over some of his fresh catch for us to have for dinner.
Anyway, I had happy memories of visiting Grandma and Chum coming (sometimes with his wife, but more often not - she worked and he was on disability) and sitting around and cracking jokes and asking our grandma if she needed him to pick her up anything from the Red Owl grocery.
I hadn't seen him in years in 2016; our grandma died in 1989 and his mom died some time around 2010, and of course my living so far away meant I couldn't really travel up there.
But anyway - in 2016 he had a massive stroke. Kind of out of the blue but as I said his health had not been fantastic since his service. He was taken to the hospital. Of course at first there wasn't much information passed along but eventually it became clear he wasn't going to get better, this wasn't a "little" stroke where with maybe some PT and assistive devices the person can go back to their lives. (I also don't think it was the kind a clotbuster drug would help; in recent years I've heard of a few people who've made amazing bounces-back after receiving those drugs in a timely manner)
The sort of heartbreaking thing I learned, when my mom had called me to tell me he had died - well, heartbreaking but also something that did bring me some peace - his wife, Bonita, went to the hospital after learning how dire things were, and got permission to go into the ICU to sit with him, and she told him: "If you need to go, I will be okay. You children are grown and are succeeding on their own; I can take care of myself. I will be sad and I will miss you but I understand if you need to go and be with your mother and dad and Tom and your grandma. You can go if you need to."
Not long after that, he died. I definitely believe sometimes people hang on like that, and her giving him "permission" or at least saying "I understand this has to happen and I will be okay" let him let go (And my friend agreed with me when I told her that; she said she had seen it in her nursing days). And then she told me that some of the mourning you feel is you remember the good old times you passed, and you know those can never come again (Well, after our grandmother died, they probably never would have, but without the finality - it's easy to ignore that).
And yes, that's true. And I find myself thinking of that around all the people I've lost in recent years - that I'll never hear Dell's laugh again, and I'll never be able to ask my dad's advice on something, and Glenna will never have the women's group over at her house again and be the gracious hostess she always was, and I'll never again sit at my grandma's kitchen table with my parents and brother and my aunts and with Chum and sometimes Tom.
And oddly enough - I also find myself thinking of how I'll never drive down to the JoAnn Fabrics again and wander its aisles, or eat at certain restaurants that I liked but that are now gone. And that's a lesser and different pain from "I will never have a conversation (at least this side of the Veil) with that person again" but it's still a little pain when I think of it.
And so, another person I care about is moving on. I hope she has a number more years with her husband and kids, even if she's not HERE to be a part of my life.
But it's just - I'm tired of so many goodbyes and last-times; I want some hellos and some 'here's a new fun thing' times to balance them.