I arrived in the office to find some of my teammates in or near tears. This is an unsettling start to a workday.
"You don't know, do you..."
OK, now that's even worse, I thought, and I was right. Turns out one of my teammates died of a heart attack yesterday while playing basketball. That he died while playing basketball perhaps underscores how little this could ever have been anticipated. My brain hurts from the rattling of my world view being shaken up.
Part of me feels somehow emotionally fraudulent for "taking it hard". This is, after all, someone I worked with, not a family member, not someone I had a strong and complex emotional attachment to. I had similar feelings when a close family friend died. Like I wasn't entirely entitled to feel the way I did. I think it's impossible, though, to have death pass this closely and not be profoundly affected. And maybe also impossible, for me, to feel like I don't deserve to react, like I somehow haven't earned the right.
I've worked hard at living more emotionally and less like Spock, but I think I'm still pretty lost when the emotions are leading the way.
This is a challenging piece, asking as it does that the audience comes into the Brown household to try to understand what it means to raise an exceptionally developmentally challenged child. Well worth the read and the resultant soul-searching.
