Gone To A Better Place
The goodbye party is a feature of life in any workplace. Someone takes another job or retires, and the occasion is observed with a gathering that may be anything from a few friends and co-workers having lunch to an institution-wide party involving food, drink, gifts, and speeches, depending on the importance of the person and the length of service.
A few weeks ago I attended one of the second type. Someone who’s been with us for over twenty years, and with whom I have worked for fifteen or so of those years, is retiring. There was a lot of talk of what she had meant to the place—all of it true—and how much she would be missed, most of that not quite so true. She will be missed, of course, by those who worked side-by-side with her every day, but much less so by others who, like myself, dealt with her much less often: we will adjust to her absence fairly quickly.
I was thinking as I drove home after this little party that these occasions are something like a death. Apart from a few people who are particularly close to the departed, her absence just isn’t going to matter all that much for very long. She’ll be replaced, we’ll deal with the new person, and soon we’ll hardly think about her at all. In time, as other people come and go, there’ll be few and eventually none who remember her or even recognize her name. I don’t mean to sound cold, because I like her, but that’s the way it is.
Even for those who worked closely with her, life will go on. For over ten years I was one half of a two-person department. I was completely dependent on the other half; we were a good team because we were each good at things the other wasn’t. She had seemed quite young to me when we met, and was pregnant with her first child. By the time she left abruptly in 2003, she was in her forties and the child was entering adolescence. We shared an office, and got to know each other very well; I can say we were friends, on a certain level—one of those partial friendships that can only happen at work between two people who really don’t have much in common.
I was personally sorry to see her go, but more so professionally: I really didn’t know how I was going to get along without her, because she had been doing work that I simply didn’t know how to do. But although it was almost a year before we got a really adequate replacement, I survived, and the institution survived. Eighteen months later her absence was hardly noticeable; now, five years later, not at all—not even by me as far as work is concerned, although those of us who worked closely with her still occasionally mention her (“Man, she would have really hated this…” etc.).
Robert Frost sums it up in the last line of his devastating poem “Out, out—”. After a sudden and rather horrible death, the survivors are described this way:
…. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
But I’ve been on the other side of those workplace departures, too; I’ve been the one leaving. And it works both ways. The one who leaves does not cease to exist; for him, rather, it’s the place he leaves behind that begins to seem unreal and soon ceases to matter at all.
In 1990 I left the most interesting, but also most challenging, job I’ve ever had, working for a high-tech company that was at the time in the forefront of its field. I had been there for about ten years when I left. What we were doing in those years had seemed exciting and important. I had worked with some really good people, a couple of whom became close friends. Leaving was a pretty major event in my life. Still, it wasn’t long at all before I ceased to feel much connection to the place. I quickly lost touch completely with the sense of urgency that had driven us, and I remember emailing one of my friends, six months or so after my departure, that the company and the market in which it competed seemed like a war from which I had been sent home. I felt a little sorry for those still caught up in it. I missed the place and the people for a while, but soon I forgot most of the people, and no doubt they forgot me, and I expect that within a few years it would have been hard to find many people who remembered me, apart from a few friends and close co-workers. It was, from their point of view, almost as if I had died.
But from my point of view it was they who remained behind in a world of which I was no longer a part, worrying about things that no longer concerned me. Within four or five years the old job had become unreal to me, of interest only as history. And no one there who remembered me had much real sense of what my new life, in a very different sort of job, was like.
This is worth keeping in mind when we think about death. The way life closes over the vacant place left by the departed, like the sea closing over a sunken ship, seems sad to us, and leaves us with a sort of guilt: did we really care? did he or she really matter? But it doesn’t look that way to the person who has died, who now is concerned with matters of which we have only a dim conception, and who may be looking back at us with pity.
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