Remembering a Friend
“Keep a fire burning in your eyess
Pay attention to the open sky
You never know what will be coming down
I don’t know what happens when people die
I can’t seem to grasp it, as hard as I try
It’s like a song I can hear, that’s playing right in my ear
That I can’t sing, but I can’t help listening”
Jackson Browne, from “For a Dancer”
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“Holy Moses, I have been removed
I have seen the specter; he has been here to…
Holy Moses I have been deceived
Now the wind has changed direction and I’ll have to leave…”
Bernie Taupin, from Elton John’s “Border Song”
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I came across a saved message on my blackberry’s voicemail box awhile ago — it was a cheerful chirpy voice, rich with a heavy southern twang, the content of the message interspersed with laughter, so typical of its sender, my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Lynda K.
The message was from July, 2012, inexplicably still in my voicemail a year and a half later, when it was supposed to self-delete after 30 days. (I originally wrote this piece 6 years ago. I just checked — this voice message is still on my I-Phone, having gotten transferred over from my blackberry when I switched devices).
She had called me while I was down in South Carolina with Mom, apologetically asking me a question about a project she was helping me out with. Since discovering it still there, I dial it up periodically, just to remind myself what life is all about.
I had worked with Lynda years ago when I was the Resource Director for the Office of Public Health Science. She worked out of our laboratory in Athens, Georgia, at the time. I’d been forewarned when I got there that she was a real pain in the rear. I soon realized that was the attitude of those steeped in bureaucratic limitations. Lynda was not, nor was I.
I’ve always relished opportunities to cut through bureaucratic “red tape”. Lynda and I got on famously from the start. She didn’t believe in the word “can’t” — she was a true visionary, always finding new ways to look at problems, subscribing to John Lennon’s philosophy “there are no problems, only solutions.” She was a brilliant scientist, and a delight to work with, always a bundle of nonstop energy.
We were a great team back then, getting initiatives in place that made significant impacts to the furtherance of food safety and public health through science. She’d develop the ideas, and I’d help her explain them in lay terms, and build a business case to pass the “laugh test” and get folks to take them seriously.
Some of her ideas were really far out. Some of them are how we do business today, just part of the routine of keeping our food safe, now. I often helped her with things that were out of my “swim lane”, but I never minded. When everyone else threw up roadblocks, she knew that if there was any way to get it done, she could count on me to figure it out.
We both moved into other parts of the agency a number of years back, and our paths didn’t cross again until early last year.
I was in the middle of an incredibly complex assignment that was difficult to get one’s head around all of the moving parts to it.
It was my turn to go to her for help. She’d done a lot of work with predictive analytics, something I had initially helped her to get a contract in place to develop years before. Someone mentioned that her contract might be of use to us in planning for the various scenarios that we were trying to get our heads around.
She immediately embraced our project, putting other work to the side to focus on solutions to our issues. She threw herself into it. The level of energy she brought to the task, and her “can-do” approach, gave us just the shot we needed to get the ball rolling in the right direction.
For several months that summer and fall, I worked closely with Lynda again, reminding me what a vibrant, full-of-life individual she truly was. She seemed thrilled to be able to return the favor to me, after all the projects I’d helped her out with.
A year ago today she and I were slated to explain this incredibly complex chart to the leadership of the agency at a senior briefing. This chart illustrated, better than any words could have, how all of the moving parts of our project would fit together, showing all of the inter-dependencies and the critical control points. The day before, we had worked out how we were going to conduct the presentation, me lining up all the dogs, and she choreographing the ponies, for our “dog and pony show”.
I was working from home that morning, putting the finishing touches on my part of it, when I got an e-mail mid-morning that was completely incomprehensible to me. Even a year later, I still find it hard to believe.
Lynda had gone home that evening, walked across the road to her rural mailbox to pickup her mail, turned around with her mail and began walking back to her house. A young, new driver, a 16 year old girl, came whipping around the bend in the road, didn’t see her in the gloaming’s dim light, and struck and killed her on the spot. Lynda was my age.
I was on my own with that afternoon’s presentation. A part of me kept waiting for Lynda to chirp in on the conference phone that was set up in the room, as others had joined us by phone, like Lynda would have. The phone remained eerily silent throughout my presentation. It was all I could do to deliver it, answer their questions, then get the hell out of that room, as quickly as I could, before losing it.
Three days later we held the Memorial and Interment services for my mother, at our church, then at Arlington National Cemetery, respectively. The juxtaposition of these two lives — Mom’s, who had lived to the ripe old age of 88 ½, and had spent the previous year knowing that she was coming down the home stretch, “on the downhill slide” as she’d put it, using that time to do what she needed to do to be ready to go — vs. Lynda’s, who was here one minute, full of life, vitality, ideas, plans, dreams, and visions, then just like that, gone the next — was hard for me to reconcile.
I really couldn’t. I still don’t understand it. I just can’t imagine that all of that energy, life, and vitality, just simply ceased to exist in that moment. This lady was a force of nature. I just can’t buy that her entire existence ended in that split second that she was struck and killed by that car.
For one thing, I know that the impact she had on me, the part that never believed in “can’t”, and the ability to keep things light and cheerful, even when they were difficult and deadly serious, is something that I carry on. I already had some of those qualities before I ever worked with her, but someone like Lynda totally reinforced it, reassuring me that it is a good way to live and work.
I know there are many others who she had a similar impact on. Knowing her changed the way people looked at the world. But, beyond that, I do believe that her spirit still goes on, in some form or fashion. I was blessed to have known her, in this life, and to have worked with her. I hope she’s keeping things lively in the afterlife — still pushing the envelope of possibility, wherever she is now. I can still her cheerful chirp and her goofy laugh — as long as that voice message stays on my blackberry (now I-Phone — still there nearly 7 years later).
Originally published at cowbird.com.
