Sunday, March 07, 2021
Fifteen years
Yesterday marked fifteen years since Mary Lee's passing. I am still grieving.
Mary Lee would sometimes exclaim "WHY MUST I BE SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS?". I don't remember how far back this went, but she did say it often during her time working as a project manager, and likely when she was the president of the condominium corporation of the building she lived in. For months now I've been mentally saying it to myself, because of frustrations in a couple of areas; I hear it in her voice.
Not only do I think of the phrase but I feel a kinship to Mary Lee's mindset when she used it. She's gone now (and those other people are not) so I can't share my frustrations with her and potentially get good advice on how to deal with them – Mary Lee had excellent self-awareness.
Although what I have to deal with is minor compared to the death sentence that she lived with after she was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, I'm now older than she was when she passed away and have some difficult things to deal with, and I find that I can now relate to the lack of things to look forward to that she experienced later in life. One of Mary Lee's characteristics was the ability to develop a lot of enthusiasm about something specific, and I have it too, though not to the same level (if Canadian singer-songwriter Allison Crowe finally gets a lot of attention once Zack Snyder's Justice League airs 11 days from now, because she sings over the closing credits, I'll be able to tell people to look at her Wikipedia entry and see who originally wrote it 16 years ago). Such enthusiasm can make up for a lot of frustration elsewhere. There was a 1924 silent movie "Happiness" whose key message was "Happiness is lookin' forward", and while that's not the only source of happiness, it's a pretty good one.
Rohan Jayasekera
Mary Lee would sometimes exclaim "WHY MUST I BE SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS?". I don't remember how far back this went, but she did say it often during her time working as a project manager, and likely when she was the president of the condominium corporation of the building she lived in. For months now I've been mentally saying it to myself, because of frustrations in a couple of areas; I hear it in her voice.
Not only do I think of the phrase but I feel a kinship to Mary Lee's mindset when she used it. She's gone now (and those other people are not) so I can't share my frustrations with her and potentially get good advice on how to deal with them – Mary Lee had excellent self-awareness.
Although what I have to deal with is minor compared to the death sentence that she lived with after she was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, I'm now older than she was when she passed away and have some difficult things to deal with, and I find that I can now relate to the lack of things to look forward to that she experienced later in life. One of Mary Lee's characteristics was the ability to develop a lot of enthusiasm about something specific, and I have it too, though not to the same level (if Canadian singer-songwriter Allison Crowe finally gets a lot of attention once Zack Snyder's Justice League airs 11 days from now, because she sings over the closing credits, I'll be able to tell people to look at her Wikipedia entry and see who originally wrote it 16 years ago). Such enthusiasm can make up for a lot of frustration elsewhere. There was a 1924 silent movie "Happiness" whose key message was "Happiness is lookin' forward", and while that's not the only source of happiness, it's a pretty good one.
Rohan Jayasekera
