Expirations

What happens when you go on vacation with a fridge full of fresh fruit?

You get really ripe fruit when you come back. Which is why I am up at this hour making banana-blueberry muffins. Also because D is out of breakfast food (haven't gotten a chance to go to the grocery store yet this week) and the clock on summer is ticking down and I won't get to do this sort of thing for him again until maybe Thanksgiving and I'm not sleepy yet, even though I should be.

I thought I was going to write about my parents' visit, but I think that will have to wait for at least one more day. For the sake of my unfinished syllabus, I may have to do it in installments! Today was a wash in terms of any progress there.

I'm sure the news of Randy Pausch's death has circulated pretty far around the world at this point -- I heard it from D on Saturday as we were pulling out of our neighborhood en route to Vancouver for the weekend. I had had a feeling that Dr. Pausch's condition was deteriorating when no news appeared on his website for more than three weeks after the last post. Of course, while my parents were in town, I couldn't really process the announcement and sort of bracketed it for later. Later happened today.

I watched Dr. Pausch's last lecture on the web during the spring semester at a time when my classes felt like they were getting to be too much to handle and the long-distance routine with D was getting to be emotionally exhausting. I won't say that the lecture's message made me sit up and quit wallowing; rather, it made me extremely aware that I wasn't living a life I loved and that the situation needed to change. There are a number of other factors that shoved me toward that realization as well, but none of them had a face, a spouse, and three children so publicly caught in an hourglass running out of sand.

Various newspapers ran obituaries and related content on Dr. Pausch after the weekend, so in the process of catching up with the headlines, I started skimming some of those articles this morning. Which led to video clips from interviews and recurring images of a man trying to fit all the memory-making moments he could into his remaining months with his family.

I have always feared -- to an unwarranted degree -- that something like this might happen to us. D and I have spent the better part of our dating years and then our marriage having to say goodbye over and over again, sometimes not knowing when we will next get to see each other. I'm sure that this is what has made me particularly fearful that the worst may happen, that we really won't get to see each other again because of some freak accident or that after we are finally together for good, some dreadful illness will take one of us away. Seeing Dr. Pausch and his wife facing that looming final separation in their interviews is heartbreaking, even more so now that he is gone. And some unhealthy part of me can't help morphing the Pausch family's loss into my own runaway imagination's worst-case scenario -- I cried this morning for the Pausches as if it were happening to me too.

I am so bad for myself sometimes.

I guess the anxiety won't completely go away until this long-distance thing is over, but in the interim, it has to be dealt with. One thing Dr. Pausch's wife said in an interview was that whenever the thought of her family's impending loss threatened to derail her, she stopped herself from going there just by saying the words "not helpful" in her mind. Maybe it will work for me -- at least until I can figure out how to cut the fear down to size.

The muffins are out of the oven, and my brain is turning into molasses. Hopefully some happier thoughts tomorrow.

Addendum: Overripe blueberries have no flavor. Just stick with bananas.