When the new shrink told me about the previous shrink's death, which had occurred less than a fortnight before, she said she wanted to make sure I learned it from her. I was glad to know (how do you say that? I'd rather know than not know, though I'm desperately not glad it happened), but I thought it hugely unlikely I would have heard about it otherwise.
I was in my cube at work when a colleague arrived to chat with CoolBoss for a moment, catching her up on an ex-DotOrgerista. Colleague spoke of the difficult year (school, baby, parents' health) the exDO had had, and then said something along the lines of how to cap it off, on New Year's Eve a friend had died, suddenly, and gave other details, including a name.
So I would have found out, not two weeks after it happened, not two days later.
It's something she and I talked about at the end of my sessions with her. She said Denver was a small town, really (it is?), and how would I like to handle it if we happened into each other? A million people in the city and another million or two in the hinterlands, sure, but it is a small town: I believe not only in six degrees of separation but also in the fact of overlapping demographics. Similar neighborhoods, income levels, political leanings, tastes in food, reading, and music, and hobbies will keep you among similar people. That's why it's important to keep punching at the bubble around you.
Also, I finally remembered something. One of the names Scarf and Drums were considering for Monkey was Sylvia, and the day I learned that, that night I dreamed of a Sylvia I once knew. For the past several weeks, I would remember this woman but not her name. It's interesting that even though her name was safe in my subconscious, my subconscious didn't retrieve it for me, either by sudden recollection or by dream, until I heard the name in such an unrelated context.
I was her assistant one day a week one summer at Millstone. She was sweet, not in the best of health, and had four adult strappingly large children (how did "strapping" gain that meaning?); at that point a fair way along the nonbreeding path, I wondered if gestating and birthing them had done her in. At the end of the summer she gave me a purple backpack that served as my gymbag during grad school.
But who I really have to get in touch with from Millstone is my main boss. Last year was the first time I heard from him rather than from his wife (whom I also knew) in the annual card exchange. Just the fact that he took pen in hand to write to an employee from 1991, though not just an employee but the amanuensis to his Grand Poobah, meant that he had more time than usual on his hands. Dear man. His wife is a dear as well; I met her several times when Poobah took me out to lunch because a proper Southern gentleman does not take a young slip of a girl to a public establishment without a chaperone. And he always stood up when she entered the room. I last saw them sometime in the mid-'90s when they returned their son to campus--and took me out to lunch. Poobah kept offering me more butter for my bread because, though he won our weight-loss wager, I had kept off the weight I'd dropped and he had not.