TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#50 – Thirteen Months

Tom?s unexpected passing will be one of the defining moments of my life. The ones you know you?ll be remembering three days, three months or three decades from now. I set out to try to document what happened in a way that I would be able to show to other people, but it ended up being just a blow-by-blow account of what those 10 days were like. I don?t think I want to remember that, it?s like taking pictures of people just after the fact. There are details there you don?t want to remember, or be remembered for. So, the blow-by-blow has gone south and I won?t waste your time with it here.

The thirteen months began last June when I threw my hat over the fence and joined the Operations group at HDS. It wasn?t something I was looking forward to and I approached it with a lot of fear and trepidation. It?s a slippery slope you start down, managing systems that need to stay up 24 hours a day with little or no support. I spent the first few months in a breathless and fearful anticipation ? wondering if I was going to do something that day or week or month that would cost me my job. That wasn?t just idle speculation, either. HDS had gone through two other e-mail admins and I was the third they?d had in as many years.

So, the year went by with me trying to hold my own in a job I wasn?t entirely sure how to do, coping with systems and personalities I wasn?t sure how to handle and a position I wasn?t sure I wanted. That?s the one sentence I could use to sum up how my work situation was for the last year.

And so, came my long-looked-forward-to vacation this year. Two weeks away from the office, away from the phone and away from all the things that were making me crazy. A lazy weekend of rock climbing started it off and I was sure we were going to have twice as much fun going through the rest of those two weeks. You know the rest ? a phone call on the first day and three hours later I was back in Phoenix and rushing to be at Tom?s side.

The next twenty-four hours were a waking nightmare. Every piece of bad news you could think of put together and served unexpected, like a pie slapping into your face. Less than twenty four hours into my vacation and I was being thrown into a world I wasn?t planning to live in and hoping that if I did, it would not be for a long time to come.

Tom was dead. And when he died, I watched. Kent Anderson describes it as ?like watching someone you love turn his back to you and walk away in long deliberate strides and knowing that nothing you do or say can make him stop and turn around, but thinking that there must be something if only you could think of it in time, and then it is too late because he is gone, because in all that long time you watched him walk away, you didn?t do whatever it was you should have done, to say what it was he needed to hear so he could stop and come back.? I watched them turn him off. I watched them remove the breathing tube from his throat. And then I watched his heart slow and stop over five minutes time. I know that he was already dead a long time before we got to it, his eyes were lazy and unfocused the last time I saw him. Like Robert Shaw said in Jaws, ??Dead eyes?doll?s eyes?. That?s all I could think of to describe how it looked, just a movie quote from twenty-five years ago.

And with that event, it became unbelievably clear what my mission in life was from then on. Or at least, it became clear what it was not. It wasn?t spending sixty to eighty hours a week worrying about things that wouldn?t get fixed or stay fixed because of lack of support from management to make them so. My life is also not about being stressed out about the job or my career because in the blink of an eye my life and Nicole?s life are forever changed and that?s something that you can?t fix no matter what your yearly salary is or what service pack level your Exchange servers are on. After being there at Tom?s passing, the answer was in front of me and here it is.

I can?t care about the job. I don?t mean that in a personal choice type of way because really, I don?t think I have a choice; it?s more like ?it is what it is?. I can?t care about staff meetings or service packs or status reports or employee reviews. I can?t because it was forcibly brought to my attention just how little any of it matters and how five years from now I won?t remember any of it. I can?t care about the job because for those five minutes, time stopped. The most important thing in the world to me was in a hospital grieving for the love that was dying in front of her. The people who are most important to her were grieving as well and you know, the drama someone?s missing e-mails from the hours of 3 to 5PM on a Monday afternoon just doesn?t stack up. Think of it as like when a groundhog finally sticks his head out of the burrow and takes a look at the big world around him. I was sitting there looking at all the dirt in front of me and suddenly, I looked up and saw the end of someone?s life. So, I can?t care. I can?t care because it doesn?t matter and my life is supposed to be more than that.

Maybe that?s a little optimistic or crazy-sounding. I?ve got a lot of opinions about how or why it ends for me. I don?t see myself collapsing at work and dying in some cubicle while people phone in their time cards or make their weekend plans. I don?t see myself going that way but I doubt Tom it happening to him that way either. Collapsing and dying while spreading epoxy at the Gila Bend RV Park in a town that, until this happened, it?s claim to fame is being one of the locations of the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII. So, I?m not going to let it be that way. I?m going to be there for Nicole and work at a job that lets me go home to her and be home for her so that if tomorrow?s the day, she will know that I was there to kiss her goodnight and be there when she ?waked up in the morning.?

Thank you, Tom. Thank you for letting me be a part of your life and thank you for everything that I now have as a result of you. Because of you I had the courage to make a decision for Nicole and me and things are on their way to being better than they have in a year. I meant what I told you the day that you died and I hope to say it again to you someday soon.

Thank you Tom. I love you. See you later.