Farewell to Someone I Passed a Lot in the Hallway

-OK, that title is misleading. You were on the same team as me for a good while. But you were a private person, and I was a private person, and our compounded private natures meant that despite being close to you in proximity, I barely knew you at all.

-Despite that, whenever you said hi to me and asked how I was doing, I felt really seen.

-You were a call-taking rockstar. A machine, even (but an empathetic one). You could pull off 90+ in a day, all of them beautiful and perfect and accurate. You were the embodiment of cool, calm, and collected. A level of excellence and professionalism that feels almost unheard of in these days of bare minimum everything. (Lord knows I don’t have it!)

-When we left office during the pandemic, I think you were still in your forties. I hadn’t seen you in more than three years, and I remember you as youthful and healthy. Seemingly healthier than most of the rest of us. Sprightly and walking briskly around the sprawling building (and I mean really bookin’ it!).

-It seems you had It for awhile without knowing, and once you found out, it was late. It’s chilling how can it feel like everything is wrong with a body when things are mostly fine – or everything can seem fine when something is deadly wrong.

-My friend says after she found out, she checked your status on Outlook and it said you’d last been seen 22 days ago. I’m glad it was fast, but also, that’s the surreal part. Not to mention that, right near the end, you were in a freaking corporate call center. You wouldn’t see it this way, but part of me feels like that really sucks.

-I am listening to Sufjan Stevens’ live performance of Carrie and Lowell while I write this, and I’m reminded how this arrangement of “Fourth of July”, though it starts out tear-jerking and desolate like the album version, mushrooms into something that sounds almost celebratory and triumphant (and during the refrain of “We’re all gonna die,” no less!). Sufjan also interjects “But I’m still alive” at the end of it, and it comes off like a doubling-down on life in the face of a whole lot of death. That’s definitely where I’m at after the past couple of days. I’m reminded, quite jarringly, that I have a lot, I mean, a LOT, of work I wanna do.