Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1192
RIP Megan Young, a doctor's visit, daddy school about cement
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am… okay. All things considered. Hold your love ones, text your longtime friends how much you love them. The news I have been dreading for two weeks or so came last night while I was asleep: my old friend of 20 years, Megan Young has passed away. It was fairly sudden, but not so sudden that it hasn’t been hanging over the heads of all that loved her for the last week or so. I mentioned it in passing in here on my horrific migraine-meets-Janes-willpower day. Could barely handle the news then, and all through the last week — my trip to Philly, seeing my friends — it’s been looming over it all. It did make seeing my friends extra special, though, so thank you Megan, thank you for that. Giving right until the end.
Megan was a friend from I was given more than to whom I gave. This is an extraordinarily rare thing in my life. From help at work to emotional help to help on my health. From texts to phone calls to visits to emailing and answering these GMHHAY emails, like so many of you do. She was magic and passion and fire and intensity and a god damed genius of a corporate executive from whom I learned much while also a magical being who transcended her job, was never made of her job, even as she achieved so much. She maybe flew too high, corporately, and realized it and pulled back and refocused her skills on right-sized organizations whom she felt better about helping, which is something I admired. She lived and loved fully and completely, and while the circumstances of her passing are medially somewhat blurry with vague, unsatisfying explanations of simultaneous organ failures, the spiritual reason our friend Elizabeth gave me suits Megan perfectly: she gave more of herself to others, helped others more than she thought to help herself.
I will miss her more than words can say, and I sure hope there’s a funeral. It’s greedy, it’s maudlin, but I was talking about in Chicago with my good friends: I will never miss a funeral again. Missing Andy’s broke me, and I am sad that in this post COVID world they seem to be getting blurrier, rarer. But I need the more than ever.
And look, I don’t want to get too hyperbolic here, but goddamn it: even if you’re single, write a fucking will and some sort of health directive and funeral wishes and put some friend in charge unless you’re 100% comfortable your family will remember to include your friends. Is that happening here, with Megan? I don’t know, but I get scared of it. And I’ve been burned by it before.
And you have a life! You contain multitudes! Those people will care! They will all care! From all walks of life!
Here are some photos from my “expensive camera with expensive ƒ 1.2 lens” era, where she made such a good model, and a few more recent, blurry, crappy iPhone ones that I will treasure from one of her visits with Liisa to Chapel Hill.
Semi-relatedly, I went to the doctor yesterday. Take care of yourself, people. Never give up on going to the doctor. Would I like to find some sort of integrated wellness and pain specialist? Well, yes, that would be lovely. But I ain’t got time to go through 1,000 quacks (great Shellac title) to find one. Or maybe I do. Maybe I will work my way down a directory or something. But in the meantime, there’s still a lot more with my current regime. Doctor gave me a migraine medicine, which I have already tried and seems quite promising. We are getting a CT scan of the brain to make sure there’s nothing physically wrong — a thing I’ve known I should do for a long time but have put off. We did a blood panel to make sure there’s nothing rheumatoidedly amiss (shame that’s not a word, rheumatoidedly). She gave me a referral to a foot doctor to deal with my nerve/bone spur issue in my foot. We got the train moving again with my neck doctor and my arm doctor and my finger doctor. Yeah, it was a lot, but it was needed, and I always do better when there are a bunch of appointments out in front of me. And yeah, through the years maybe 80% of those appointments have been a waste of time, but they other 20% have been life-saving, life-changing, so I begin again the cycle of the docs. Once more into the fray.
Also did the Walmart and recycling run yesterday, because Emma took Jane to Cary in the afternoon and it occurred to me in this summer regime I will not have an hour free of Jane in the morning on Sunday mornings, so I took my shot after the doctor and pharmacist. No grocery store still has Quaker Oats Squares the things have been recalled for almost a year now. Harris Teeter makes a solid generic version but it’s always out of stock. I wish there was some way to buy blueberries and strawberries without buying plastic. I am growing both but not yet in sufficient quantities to negate the external need. All the grocery stores were filled with old people, I forgot Thursdays were senior day. So many sad old men alone, in Honeywell or AT&T shirts, or some ensignia of a formerly great America. Buying TV dinners alone because they haven’t figured out how to use delivery apps yet I guess? I don’t know. Why don’t these men know how to cook it is a mystery. Generation of learned helplessness in the kitchen, at least that’s what it looked like yesterday.
At Daddy School the other night we learned about concrete. We took a field trip to the fireplace to learn about cement and mortar and the magic that happens when you add water, sand and rock to your limestone-clay cement. We compared the mortar on our rockwork to the concrete on our walkway and on our driveway. We learned about the difference between concrete and asphalt. I tried to go back to macadam but she was not having it, but I did get Göbekli Tepe, Roman concrete, the Pantheon, and John Smeaton and his lighthouse in. Concrete, man. The thing humans have built the most of in the world. Jane was rightfully fascinated and I was smug AF.
That whole period where I was short on playlists has been over for a while. But I’ve not been posting them. But they’ve been piling up. Here. Have our one hundred and fiftieth “Moody and Quiet” playlist. Seems fitting for a death day. I don’t know if Megan liked any of these bands but “When We Were Beautiful and Young” is a fitting song title.
Hold your family tight. Text your friends. Ideally when your sober.
And have a lovely weekend.
So sorry to hear about your friend Megan. May her memory be a blessing. I’m going to reach out to some friends today.
I get blueberries and other berries and fruits at our local farmers markets and they are in those green paper fiber containers that recycle. I hate the clamshell plastic too.