Here I sit, alone at home, doing a new job for a new company and dreading each new day. It's not the job or the work - I really enjoy it. It's that I am not enjoying isolation; my kids are at the farm and across the river, and their absence makes me ache.
My friends are the meet-for-a-beer kind, which is a source of fun and joy for me, and our Cheers has been boarded over. Even when quarantine lifts, meet-for-a-beer will change.
Like Jean-Luc Picard in the new Trek, I'm feeling the walls closing in - and, like Picard, this is squeezing regret from my every pore.
"I haven't been living," Picard tells his housekeeper, "I've just been waiting to die." I'm not quite there, but there is the disturbing insecurity that despite my persistent youth, COVID could take me.
If it does - if COVID-19 takes me - I will depart with some regrets. Perhaps the biggest is my kids; for all that we share, for all our closeness, I didn't give them all I could have. I was selfish; much of the time I could have invested in them, I invested in myself. Oh, they have all the pop culture they could hope for - great music and authors and movies that I turned them onto - but I didn't teach them as much as I could have about things that matter more. And I didn't invest enough time in their interests that would have been enriching to me.
If COVID-19 takes me, I'll regret the many years wasted in the church. I've already overshared that I persisted in the tribe many, many years after realizing my heart wasn't there. I did my peers no favors, and did myself real harm, not moving on to greener pastures much earlier than I did.
If COVID-19 takes me, I will regret the state of the family I came from. Long since fractured - horrifically so! - by my parents' divorce, the relationships between us all are brittle and tenuous. I never know which of them is mad at the other, it shifts so often. As far as I know, I'm not at odds with any of them, and my dad and I communicate regularly, and my brother Dan and I are actually close. But the lack of harm to me is due to my aloof posture, adopted many years ago. I had my own problems, I steered clear; and I contributed nothing to the family's healing.
If COVID-19 takes me, I will regret the loss of someone dearly loved, over my ADD - not because I feel responsible for having ADD, but because I grew complacent, and failed to do all that I could to put a firewall between ADD and the relationship. It was that complacency, and not the ADD itself, that cost me that someone.
(Why is he telling us this?)
I'm telling you this because, as I sit here, I've had a very sobering realization.
COVID-19 could take me.
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