12. This Morning
I ran into Jennie, a ginger-haired young woman who works at the same company I do (should it remain nameless? have I already let its name slip?), this morning while parking our bikes. She sports a bright pink helmet, one of those not meant for cyclists but for skateboarders. It serves its purpose just the same, I bet, and helps her out by making her flashy (and, for those safety-conscious readers out there, quite visible) on the street.
We headed into the hall to wait for the elevators to suck us out of level P1 when we spotted what at first looked like a cockroach on the brown tiled floor. She nudged it with her sandal. She asked me, “Is that what I think it is?” I responded, “Looks like a cross between a multivitamin and a button from my ankle-length mauve winter coat from the mid-'80s.”
She then told me about a woman in her department who died two days before while eating out. Some sort of violent food allergy. Here's her story (I’m not mentioning this to be a depressive downer [especially, nestled as this detail is amidst my 9/11 memories] but I take this as just another indication that we all must work as hard as we can to live our best lives, live each day to its fullest and all of that seemingly cliché nonsense that actually rings quite true). The following is Miss Smith's obituary (again, names have been changed to protect the innocent & the deceased) that was posted on our company's Intranet. Our company’s flags were at half-staff that day in her honor.
Miss Smith, a familiar face at the company for 31 years, died suddenly after becoming ill at a restaurant. She was XX years old.
She was dining with friends, “laughing and having a wonderful time,” when she experienced what appeared to be a food allergy. According to friends, she had trouble breathing and died within minutes. In announcing her death to company staff, her supervisor said she “lived life large.”
“She loved good food, good wine, good friends. She was both kind and passionate by nature. She remarked often how much she loved her job and especially the people in our department,” her supervisor said.
Her mother was American, her father Peruvian. Her early education was in Peru, and her higher education was at XXXXX University. She was fluent in Spanish and French, very good at Italian and Portuguese, and she spoke a smattering of several other languages.
Many of her colleagues relied on her for on-the-spot translations, and she was always willing to help a visitor who did not speak English.
She seems like an amazing woman. Loyal, loving, passionate.
Jenny seemed pretty out of it this morning. She said a bunch of young people from her department went out drinking yesterday to reflect on their deceased co-worker's death and come together in their pain and shock over what happened. She said her co-worker was great and really kept her department together.
That was all we had time to say to each other as the elevator darted up and deposited me on the first floor so I could skip into the cafeteria and get my all-important morning coffee.
Until I got my coffee, charged across the courtyard to my building, and logged onto our Intranet, I didn’t think again about Jenny and her openness in telling me about her co-worker. Jenny hadn’t mention the dead woman’s name; all told, she and I probably spoke for less than 40 seconds.
Amazing how things can pass out of your mind in the trivial to’ing and fro’ing of daily life. For example, after I left Jenny and headed into the cafeteria, I exchanged small talk with other staffers stranded and a bit worried about the lack of coffee and signed up for some learning classes offered by our library. How quickly we lose perspective! How tenuous our holds on what really matters.
Thanks to Jenny, the team that maintains our Intranet, and a chat with some of my researching co-workers here in the office, the recently passed on woman came back to my consciousness and, with her, a renewed resolve to do what I can to live a good life. Not just at work or on the treadmill, that stuff is really just the minutia of life. But giving my dog one more hug, my husband one more kiss, sending one more card to my grandmother, calling my mom one extra time each week, if only for five minutes while en route to the grocery store.
Life is precious. I want to be loyal to work and friends, loving in all things, and passionate about the journey I’m on. And it’s hard.
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